McCOWN'S LONGSPUR 1567 



on seeds; walked rather than hopped about, now in, now out of view in the white 

 spirals the wind flung down the roadway. Now and again two males squared off 

 in what seemed to be threat postures, head down, beaks open, wings laid back 

 and fluttering slightly. There was some chasing presumably of McCown's 

 females by males. A male pursued a female across the road and back again; then 

 both flew down the road; the white area in the tail and the black terminal band 

 were sharply revealed in flight; both vanished in the obscurity of snowdust. A 

 female faced an approaching male; male promptly veered aside, lifting his wings 

 slightly but enough to show the white linings momentarily. 



About five minutes passed. When the squall abated, the birds moved in short 

 nights above the road and along the bank; appeared restless. As the road ahead 

 cleared, the birds arose above the sage and met the hard push of the wind. For 

 a moment they hung there, swinging sidewise, dark shapes moving at a cord's-end, 

 without advancing. Then in a slacking wind or in an extra spurt of driving power, 

 they swept low over the sage and vanished. By the time we drove beyond the 

 cutbank, though the storm had lifted somewhat, the birds had become indis- 

 tinguishable from the driven gusts. 



It is a bird of a landscape dominated by rolling prairies where sage 

 and buffalo grass are the characteristic floristic types, and chestnut- 

 collared longspurs, horned larks and sage grouse are the characteristic 

 birds. Saunders (1912), riding on horseback across the divide 

 between the drainages of the Dearborn and Sun Rivers, gives an 

 excellent account of the approach to prairie habitat for which 

 McCown's seems to have a preference: "The rolling, round-topped 

 hills changed to fantastically shaped, flat-topped, prairie buttes, the 

 tall grass and blue lupine changed to short buffalo-grass and prickly 

 pear, and the bird voices changed from Vesper Sparrows and Meadow- 

 larks, to Horned Larks and McCown Longspurs." 



Called McCown's bunting, rufous-winged lark bunting, black- 

 breasted longspur, black-throated bunting, and "ground larks" 

 (Raine, 1892) by "the natives" at Rush Lake in Saskatchewan, in 

 southern Alberta it is often "one of the few common, widespread 

 birds of the open country" (Rand, 1948); sometimes "on flattopped 

 prairie benches, this is the only bird found" in Teton and Northern 

 Lewis and Clark counties (Saunders, 1914). 



The monotypic status of Rhyncophanes mccownii has been questioned 

 several times. In his general discussion of the genus Plectrophanes, 

 S. F. Baird (1858) suggested in 1858 a new genus, Rhyncophanes. In 

 his description of the species, Baird says: "The Plectrophanes Mac- 

 cownii is quite different from the other species of the genus in the 

 enormously large bill and much shorter hind claw, so much so, in 

 fact, that Bonaparte places it in an entirely different family. As, 

 however, many of the characteristics are those of Plectrophanes, 

 and the general coloration especially so, I see no objection to keeping 

 it in this genus for the present." 



Coues (1880) writes: "As Baird exhibited in 1858, there is a good 

 deal of difference among the birds usually grouped with Plectroplianes 



