Clark's Crows and Oregon Jays on Mount Hood^ 



BY FLORENCE A. MERRIAM 



c 



LOUD CAP INN, the 

 loghouse hotel fastened 

 down with cables high 

 on the north side of Mount 

 Hood, is too near timber-line 

 to claim a great variety of 

 feathered guests, but Oregon 

 Jays and Clark's Crows or 

 Nutcrackers are regular pen- 

 sioners of the house. The 

 usual shooting by tourists 

 does not menace them, for the 

 nature-loving mountaineers, who keep the Inn and act as guides to 

 the summit, guard most loyally both birds and beasts. They like to 

 tell of a noble Eagle which used to fly up the canon and circle over 

 the glacier every day, and they recall with pleasure the snowy morning 

 when an old Blue Grouse brought her brood to the Inn, and the birds 

 ate the wheat that was thrown them with the confidence of chickens. 

 The Grouse were, apparently, regular neighbors of the Inn, and 

 while there I had the pleasure of seeing a grown family. They fed 

 on the slope close above me with the unconcern of domestic fowls, 

 conversing in turkey-like monosyllables as they moved about, and 

 two of them came within a few feet and looked up at me — that not 

 fort}^ rods from the Inn ! The pleasure of the sight was doubled by 

 the reflection that such things 

 could be so near a hotel, 

 even on a remote mountain. 



It was delightful to see 

 how familiarly birds gathered 

 about the house. You could 

 sit in the front doorway and 

 when not absorbed in look- 

 ing oft on the three wonder- 

 ful snow peaks — St. Helens, 

 Rainier, and Adams — rising 

 above the Cascade range, 

 could watch Oregon Juncos, 

 Steller's Jays, Oregon Jays, and Nutcrackers coming down to drink 

 at the hydrant twenty feet away ; while the Ruby Kinglet and White- 



*Read before the American Ornithologist's I'nion. Nov. i6, 189S. 



(46) 



CLOUD CAP INN 



