ee THE HEPBURN LEUCOSTICTE. 
finches moving about demurely upon the face of a choppy snowdrift, pecking 
at the surface here and there, he begins to harbor an uncanny suspicion that 
the birds do eat snow. Closer examination, however, shows that the surface 
of all snow-banks, not freshly covered, is sprinkled with insects,—midges, 
beetles, wasps, and the like—insects which the spring gales have swept up 
to uncongenial heights and dropped, benumbed or dead with cold. ‘These 
battered waifs the Leucostictes gather with untiring patience, and they are 
thus able to subsist as no other species can, up to the very summits. 
The eggs of the Hepburn Leucosticte have not to our knowledge yet 
been taken. Mr. D. E. Brown, then of Glacier, found these birds scooping 
hollows under grass tussocks on the middle slopes of Baker, above timber 
line, on the 7th of June, 1905. On the 20th of July, 1900, Professor Lynds 
Jones and myself found a thick-walled grass nest settled upon bare rock 
without protection, on the south slope of the aiguille of Wright’s Peak, at 
an elevation of some 9,000 feet, and within a hundred yards of the summit; 
this could hardly have belonged to any other species. 
In July, 1907, knowing that it was too late for eggs, I yet spent several 
days searching the precipitous wall which separates the upper Horseshoe 
Basin from the glacier which heads Thunder Creek. Adult birds to the 
number of a dozen gleaned scraps from the dump of the Cascade Mine house; 
but, altho each made off in business-like fashion when “loaded,” the stretch 
of the wall was too vast and its recesses too mazy to permit of exact work 
in tracing. I therefore examined carefully but with difficulty several of the 
weathered fissures, or couloirs, which ran perpendicularly up the face of the 
cliff. Here, under cover of rocks which had lodged in the throat of the 
fissure, or which had weathered out unevenly, old nests were found, simple 
affairs of coiled grasses, and too dilapidated for exact measurement. From 
one of these sites a pebble snapped from the finger must have fallen three 
hundred feet before striking the glacier below. 
Now and then a passing bird, suspicious of my intent, stopped on some 
projecting point of rock, to utter the sole note which does duty for every 
mood, churkk or schthub, a sound comparable only to the concussion of a 
small taut rope on a flag-pole. Finally, near the top of the Sahale Glacier, 
I got a line at two hundred yards on an occupied fissure, and traced both 
parent Leucostictes into its distant recesses. Climbing cautiously up a sharp 
slope of ice, my footsteps were guided by the almost incessant clamor of young 
birds. Arrived at the upper lip of the glacier, however, I found that it stood 
away from the rock-wall some fifteen feet, and that a chasm some forty feet 
in depth yawned beneath. Into this forbidding bergschrund, one of the 
fledgling Leucostictes had tumbled. He was not more than two-thirds grown 
(July 18th) and down feathers still fluttered from his cheeks, but he was a 
plucky little fellow, and had managed to scramble up off the ice onto a piece 
