backed—and two kinglets. As to the kinglets Grinnell makes some 
interesting observations; he found the golden-crowned common 
everywhere about Sitka, especially in the dense fir thickets along the 
streams. He says: 
On June 22, as I was carefully picking way through a clump of firs, 
I chanced upon six of these mites of birds sitting in a row close together 
on a twig; but when one of the parents appeared and discovered me, her 
single sharp note scattered them in all directions with a chorus of squeaks, 
and then in a moment all was quiet and not one to be seen, although all were 
probably watching me intently within a radius of ten feet. 
Of the thrush family this coastal region has the russet-backed 
and the Alaska hermit. The western variety of the robin is present in 
large numbers, and with the familiar disposition he shows in the East; 
also the Oregon, or varied, robin—the last of the list of those birds 
known or believed to rear their young on the seaward side of the 
mountains. 
WOODED-INTERIOR DISTRICT (B) 
The principal sources of information upon the birds of the in¬ 
terior of Alaska are the Report by Edward W. Nelson, hitherto 
quoted, and the account by Dr. Louis B. Bishop, in North American 
Fauna, No. 19, of a “biological reconnoissance of Alaska” made in the 
summer of 1889. Dr. Bishop states that about a third of the birds 
noted by him had their center of distribution in the east, and mi¬ 
grated to Alaska along the Yukon Valley. 
The account of the birds of this district, which embraces the for¬ 
ested part of the Territory north of the Alaskan Mountains, begins, 
as usual, at the lower end of the scale in classification, so that—as sea¬ 
birds are absent—the first to be mentioned are the fresh-water ducks. 
The American and red-breasted mergansers, the mallard, shoveler, 
baldpate, pintail, scaup, American goldeneye or whistlewing, buffle- 
head, old-squaw, harlequin, both of the teals, and the surf-scoter, all 
occur, breeding in suitable places; but the green-winged teal and the 
pintail are by far the most widely distributed and most often en¬ 
countered. The breeding-habits of several of them, typical of all, 
have been described by Mr. Nelson (pages 40, 41) as he learned them 
on the coastal tundras. 
Of the geese, while all species are seen during their migrations, 
the brown, or Hutchins’s goose, is most numerous in summer in 
the interior, where they are said to resort to the hilltops for nesting- 
sites. Dali reports the white-fronted goose, however, breeding gre¬ 
gariously all along the Yukon, depositing their eggs in hollows 
16 
