McCOWN'S LONGSPUR 1593 



garden some twenty feet from the nest. The kettle and Longspur 

 combination, although perhaps picturesque, struck me as rather 

 incongruous and I replaced the kettle by a rock which pleased me 

 better and seemed to suit the Longspur just as well. He came re- 

 peatedly to perch there after descending from his song flight or return- 

 ing from an absence * * *." 



In May 1899 in Montana, Silloway (1902) found the longspurs 

 singing from the ground. A concentration remained hidden by the 

 blending of their coloration with the background of bare gray ground 

 and last year's dead vegetation: 



When * * * about sixty yards to one side of their position, I was attracted 

 by a series of strange songs, uttered with unusual force. Walking in the direction 

 of the unfamiliar music, I found that the Longspurs were the authors, and for 

 many minutes I watched different songsters twittering their pretty little songs. 

 The performance was a continuous chatter, having some resemblance to portions 

 of Meadowlark music. It was quiet similar to the continuous, hurried measures 

 of the Horned Larks, though louder and clearer. In some instances the performer 

 uttered the act of singing while pecking for seeds among the dead herbage, thus 

 showing a further resemblance in habit to the Horned Larks. A noticeable 

 feature of the performance was the movements of the white throats as the spirited 

 measures bubbled forth. 



Field Marks. — Silloway (1903) describes the male as: "Upper parts 

 chiefly grayish brown, streaked with darker; top of head, and large 

 crescent on breast, black; wing coverts reddish-brown; lower parts 

 grayish white." DuBois (1937b) has this description of the female: 



The upper surface of the head is uniformly covered with faint, fine, wavy streaks 

 * * *. The face has a buffy appearance, with a line over the eye that is more 

 whitish. * * * The throat is white. There is just a faint suggestion of darker 

 gray on the breast where the black patch adorns the male. The wrist of her wing 

 shows a little of the reddish brown "shoulder" patch worn by her mate. * * * 

 When the bird takes flight, she shows, conspicuously, an almost black T-shaped 

 design at the end of the white spread tail. The sexes are alike in this tail pattern, 

 which constitutes the best field mark. 



Enemies. — Various plundering marauders play havoc with the nests 

 and eggs of McCown's longspurs. DuBois (1937a) relates that in 

 Montana "carcasses of [Longspur] fledglings were seen at a Short- 

 eared Owl's nest, and at a nest of Swainson Hawks" but concludes 

 that raptores were in general "almost neglible factors in the lives of 

 the longspurs at this place." Among the mammals considered 

 predatory, DuBois points his finger at the weasel and the skunk. He 

 adds, "Punctured eggs or broken shells showing tooth marks, noted 

 in several instances, were thought to be the work of the common 

 ground squirrels [the thirteen-lined (Citellus tridecemlineatus) and 

 Richardson's (C. richardsonii)], though I have never caught one of 

 these rodents in the act of plundering a nest. Whenever a ground 

 squirrel approached a nest, the longspurs drove him away by swooping 



648-737 — 68 — pt. 3 23 



