78 NORTH AMERICAN FAUNA. [no. 19. 



entrance was 5 feet 8 inches from the ground, on the lower side of a 

 living-, slightly leaning spruce, and the cavity was 10 inches deep. 

 Osgood shot what we both supposed was one of the parents, for it cer- 

 tainl}^ came in answer to the cries of the young; yet this bird proved 

 to be a typical adult male of P. amerlcanus alanceni^h. We saw no 

 other woodpeckers there, except flickers. 



96. Picoides americanus alascensis. Alaska Three-toed Woodpecker. 

 Osgood found the remains of an Alaska three-toed woodpecker at 



Haines June 1, and I shot a laying female near Glacier June 10. In 

 the Yukon Valley we secured one on Six-Mile River; three on Fifty- 

 Mile River above Miles Canyon July 10-11, two of them young- 

 adults; two on the Lewes River between Big Salmon and Little Salmon 

 rivers July 20-21, and two at Circle, August 19-20. The young have 

 whiter backs than the adults. 



97. Sphyrapicus ruber. Red-breasted Sapsucker. 



I took an adult male at Skagway May 31, and heard what I suppose 

 was its mate. 



98. Colaptes auratus luteus. Northern Flicker. 



We saw and heard flickers several times at Glacier. One, which 

 Osgood flushed from a hole high in a dead pine June 8, had yellow quills. 

 In the Yukon Valle}^ this is by far the most common woodpecker. 

 We found it quite regularly from Log Cabin to Circle, but, like most 

 Yukon birds, it was shy. At Caribou Crossing June 27 Osgood secured 

 a female and found her nest, containing 8 young and 3 eggs, in a cavity 

 3 feet from the ground in a partly dead poplar. At Six-Mile River 

 we found a nest about 6 feet from the ground, and at Lower Lebarge 

 July 17 I found 7 well-fledged young in a cavity about 6 feet from the 

 ground in a small dead tree in a burnt tract. July 25 1 took a full- 

 grown 3^oung near Selkirk. 



Adult flickers from Alaska average slightly darker than luteus from 

 Canada and farther south, the wings, tail, and bars of upperparts 

 being somewhat blacker, and the light parts more olive and less buffy. 

 Three young — one from near Fort Selkirk, the others nestlings from 

 Lower Lebarge — show this difi'erence in a marked degree, having the 

 wings, tail, and bars of upperparts deep black, and the ground color 

 above smok}^ olive, instead of bufly olive as in luteus,' they are even 

 darker than the young of auratus from Florida. But the slightness 

 of the difi'erence shown by the adults, the small number of specimens 

 from Alaska, and the possibility that the plumage of the three young 

 maj" have been discolored by the burnt trees where they were found — 

 though microscopic examination shows no sign of this — make their 

 separation as a subspecies inadvisable at present. 



