BROWN-CAPPED ROSY FINCH 381 



hand. During two days that I remained in town I caught five alive 

 under a common flour-sieve * * *," In Rocky Mountain National 

 Park I have often walked to within 10 feet of winter flocks of leu- 

 costictes, and once a band settled to the ground all around me. 



Their habit of carrying their bodies close to the ground gives a 

 flock of feeding rosy finches some resemblance to longspurs, but they 

 do not creep as longspm*s do. Aiken writes (Ridgway, 1875) : "They 

 move on the ground with quick, short hops, their feet so closely drawn 

 up into their ruffled feathers as to be almost invisible." 



Enemies. — Probably rosy finches fall prey occasionally to the several 

 species of hawks and other predators present on both their summer 

 and winter ranges, but the only reported attack on brown-capped rosy 

 finches appears to be that of Niedrach (MS.), who watched a merlin 

 {Falco columbarius richardsoni) chase some of them imsuccessfuUy at 

 a roost at Morrison. 



Voice. — The note most frequently heard from the brown-capped 

 rosy finch is a rather harsh, goldfinchlike peyt-a-weet the birds utter 

 as they rise from the ground and repeat on the wing. The incessant 

 prenuptial singing of the male has been described above, as has the con- 

 tinual chirping of the nestUngs and the characteristic caU the parents use 

 when flying between the nest and feeding ground. After the young 

 fledge, the adults are rather silent, occasionally emitting a thick-toned 

 chirp, but the young birds keep up an incessant clamor, "like young 

 chimney swifts," as F. M. Drew (1881) describes it. "The wind was 

 very high at the time [August 17], and often whUe standing in a lode 

 drift, the noise would go rushing by sounding like the distant jingle of 

 sleigh bells." 



In winter the foraging flocks are conversational, twittering together 

 quite noisily, and the birds are very quarrelsome and noisy about their 

 roosts. Aiken (Ridgway, 1875) describes a winter song: "I have 

 several times heard one of them sing, a pretty, warbling song, some- 

 what like that of the canary, but so low as hardly to be heard at a 

 distance of more than two or three rods." I have heard what were 

 probably fragments of this song among the winter flocks at Rocky 

 Mountain National Park. 



Winter. — The foothills of the Front Range and of the Arapahoe 

 Range rise abruptly from the Great Plains about 20 miles west of 

 Denver. The first isolated ridge, known as the Hogback with an 

 average elevation of 5,500 feet, marks the normal eastern limit of the 

 winter range of the brown-capped rosy finch. Westward the species 

 is foimd in winter in most of the basins and mountain "parks" that 

 lie between the ranges, particularly in North Park, Middle Park, and 

 South Park, southwestward to Mesa Verde National Park, and at a 

 number of other places in the western half of the State. Some of 



