He, "THE AMERICAN PIPIT. 
busybodies of the place are the Pipits. Females, lisping suspiciously, hurry 
to and fro, discussing locations, matching straws, playfully rebuking over- 
bold swains, and hastily gulping insects on the side. The male birds hover 
about their mates solicitously—never helping, of course—or else sing lustily 
from prominent knolls and rocks. 
The Pipit song in many of its phases is strikingly like that of the Rock 
Wren (Salpinctes obsoletus). It has the same vivacity and ringing quality, 
tho perhaps less power, and the similarity extends to the very phrasing. An 
alarm note runs pichoo pichoo pichoo, given six or seven times, rapidly and 
emphatically ; while another, wee wich, wee wich, wee wich, is rendered, unless 
my eyes deceive me, with the same springing motion which characterizes the 
Wren. An ecstacy song of courting time (heard on Mount Rainier) runs tziss 
twiss twiss twiss (ad lib.), uttered as rapidly as the syllables may be said. It 
is delivered as the bird describes great slow circles in mid-air; and when the 
singer is exhausted by his efforts, he falls like a spent rocket to the ground. 
For all this activity, however, the nests are hard to find. Finally, as we 
keep ascending the ridge, bare save for occasional patches of snow in the 
hollows, Jack spies an old nest, last year’s of course, in the recess of a soil 
tussock, completely overarched by earth. The secret is out, and we can 
search with more intelligence now. Soon I! flush a female at her task of in- 
cubation. She has been digging out a pocket, or cave, in a moist bank which 
the snow had set free not above three days before. The earth removed from 
the interior is piled up for the lower rim, or wall, and a few rootlets, doubt- 
less those secured in the process of excavation, have been culled out and laid 
horizontally along the edge of the dirt. The hole is about as large as my 
double fists, and the nest, when completed, evidently cannot be injured by 
falling snow. 
In July of the following year, work was carried on in the Upper Horse- 
shoe Basin, a few miles further north. The song period was evidently past, 
but a nest of five eggs slightly incubated, was taken from a heather slope on 
the 2oth of the month. The sitting bird flushed from under the beating 
stick, but only after I had passed. 
On the 17th, a venturesome climb over the rock-wall which fronts the 
glacier of the Upper Basin, had yielded only a last year’s Leucosticte’s nest. 
As I was nearly down the cliff and breathing easier, a Pipit flew unannounced 
from a spur of the cliff upon which I was standing to the one beyond. Evi- 
dently she had heard the call of her mate, for the instant she lighted upon the 
cliff he was near her. But budge not a foot would he; whether he was sus- 
picious or only exacting, one could not quite tell. At any rate he kept giving 
vent to a ringing metallic note of apprehension. ‘The female coaxed with 
fluttering wings, and moved slowly forward as she did so, finally securing 
gs, 
the worm from her reluctant lord, when—whisk! she was back again and out 
