1590 U.S. NATIONAL MUSEUM BULLETIN 2,37 part 3 



Voice. — To the dweller on the north central great plains, few 

 experiences after a long hard winter equal the pleasure and the promise 

 of the song bursts of certain early spring birds. Chaucer had his 

 "smale foule" which "maken melodie" but the prairie-dweller has his 

 horned larks and Sprague's pipits with their spectacular singing flights 

 high aloft, seemingly cloud-high, and their dizzy plummeting to earth. 

 He has his lark buntings and chestnut-collared longspurs with their 

 less spectacular but more graceful and butterfly-like descent to earth, 

 bubbling with sound. With them McCown's forms a trio in the grace 

 and musical quality of the aerial performances. 



Writes P. M. Silloway (1902) of Montana: 



In a wagon trip across many miles of prairie in the last week of May 1S99 I 

 was regaled by the well-known flight-songs of the males of this species. Numbers 

 of them were frequently seen in the air at one time, some of them mounting 

 upward in irregular, undulating, star-like lines of movement, pouring forth their 

 hurried bursts of song; others could be seen floating downward with out-spread, 

 elevated wings, uttering their ecstatic measures as they slowly floated to earth 

 without moving a feather. 



E. S. Cameron (1907) recalls that near Terry, Montana, "On 

 June 22, 1894, I had ample opportune for observing this species, as, 

 my horse having run away, I was compelled to walk home, ten miles 

 across the prairie. My way was enlivened by the handsome males, 

 which hung above me, before sinking into the grass with a burst of 

 song." 



One of the earliest to describe the song of McCown's longspur was 

 George Bird Grinnell (Ludlow, 1875). Traveling as zoologist with 

 the Custer Expedition into the Black Hills in 1874, on observing the 

 bird near Fort Lincoln (present day Bismarck) in North Dakota, he 

 calls it "by far the most melodious songster" on "the high dry plains. 

 It rises briskly from the ground, after the manner of C. bicolor until 

 it attains a height of 20 or 30 feet, and then, with outstretched wings 

 and expanded tail, glides slowly to earth, all the time singing with the 

 utmost vigor." 



In July of 1911, Aretas A. Saunders (1912) took a horseback ride 

 "nearly across the State of Montana" — one of those adventures which 

 the more sedentary only dream about. In the flat open prairie of 

 Broadwater County where the "principal vegetation was buffalo-grass 

 and prickly pear," he found McCown's longspur 



in full song, a charmingly sweet song, that tinkled across the prairie continually 

 and from all sides. The song has been compared to that of the Horned Lark, but 

 to my mind it is much better. The quality is sweeter and richer; the notes are 

 louder and clearer, and above all, the manner in which it is rendered is so different 

 from that of the lark or of any other bird, that the lark passes into insignificance 

 in comparison. The song is nearly always rendered when in flight. The bird 

 leaves the ground and flies upward on a long slant till fifteen or twenty feet high, 

 then spreads both wings outward and upward, lifts and spreads its white tail 



