10 Massachusetts Audubon Society 



THE BUFFALO BIRD 



By a Member of the Audubon Society 



In August at the Hotel Chateau, Lake Louise, in the Canadian Rocky 

 Mountains, I was much interested in the peculiar behavior of a small 

 bird about the size of a bobolink of a dark brownish-gray color, with 

 huffy edges to the feathers of the back. He had absolutely no fear of 

 mankind. Instead of flying or running away as I approached he would 

 trot calmly to meet me, only pausing when he was at a distance of a yard 

 to look up at mel inquisitively, and turn his head from side to side to 

 examine me critically with either eye. 



The children soon discovered that he was begging for horseflies, 

 which were abundant on the path he frequented at the border of the Lake. 

 If I caught one he would take it from my fingers, or if I laid a dead 

 fly in the palm of my hand, he would alight on the thumb and calmly 

 eat it, stopping afterwards to preen his feathers. He would perch on the 

 arm, shoulders or head of any one if enticed by a dead fly, and he was 

 in no hurry to move off. 



As may be imagined he became the object of interest of many of the 

 hotel guests and was often the centre of a throng of people. If you 

 wanted the bird to come to you, you had only to slap yourself, when he 

 would at once leave the other people and run up to see if you had suc- 

 ceeded in catching a fly for him. A newly arrived guest, a young lady, 

 was so surprised that she screamed when he peeked a live fly from her 

 foot just above her shoe. He was always solitary, and it was said that 

 he had only been seen for two weeks. On one occasion I had been sitting 

 down catching flies and watching at the same time a group of people 

 feeding the bird. They all disappeared in the woods. I arose and slowly 

 advanced in the direction thev had taken, holding the flies in my open 

 hand; the bird flew directlv from a tree onto my hand when I was still 

 a hundred and fifty yards away from the place where the birds had espied 

 me. What keen vision to have seen dead flies from so far! Another 

 time he took a long flight straight at the face of a man walking along the 

 path. When within a few feet of his eyes the man involuntarily threw 

 up his hands for protection. A fly on his face was probably the source 

 of attraction. 



No one seemed to know what sort of a bird this was. One called it a 

 bufl'alo-bird. In the days when vast herds of bison were still roving the 

 plains, buffalo-birds were said to live among them, perching on their backs 

 and flanks and devouring flies, and following the herd wherever it wandered. 

 Can som.e one sav whether the cowbird and the buffalo-bird are one and 

 ihe same bird? This bird looked like a young cowbird but the legs 

 (tarsi) appeared unusually long. 



At Banff, twenty miles east of Lake Louise, there is a herd of buffaloes. 

 One day the bird followed an automobile going from Lake Louise to 

 Banff; but he returned and at last accounts is still at the Lake. 



Covvbirds arc, or at least were formerly, called buffalo-birds in the 

 West. The bird our correspondent saw at Lake Louise' was undoubtedly 

 a cowbird in the immature plumage. — Editor. 



