Passing to the tribe of insectivorous perching-birds—the song¬ 
sters of wood and meadow—we find the list in this district a short 
one; yet representatives of many kinds familiar in the south resort to 
these far northern valleys and hills to rear their young during the 
brief season of warmth allotted to them for that purpose. Among these 
are several flycatchers, the first on the list being the phoebe. It is 
especially welcome because it settles at once in the villages and 
about the miners’ cabins, and dares, with engaging confidence, to place 
its nest of mud and moss upon the projecting end of some house-log, 
or beneath the porch or eaves. Where rocky cliffs border the Yukon 
the phoebes build their nests on the ledges, as seems to have been 
their primitive custom everywhere. Their highway of migration is 
along the course of the great river. 
The olive-s'ded flycatcher, which one would expect to find here, 
does not seem to go much north of British Columbia. The plaintive 
call of Richardson’s, or the Alaska, wood pewee, is to be heard in 
summer even beyond the Arctic Circle, and its eggs may be looked 
for in July. The alder and Hammond’s flycatchers are numerous in 
this district wherever thickets of alders and willows grow in warm 
valleys. 
Steller’s jay occasionally follows the Yukon north to its great 
bend near the international boundary. The jay of Alaska, however, is 
the “smoky” form {fmiiifrons) of the Canada jay, known to everyone 
by such names as whisky jack, camp-robber, moose-bird, and the 
like. It is as bold in its nest-making as in other things, and often 
lays eggs which must hatch in a temperature below zero. Joseph 
Grinnell gives a graphic account of its nesting, supplementing the 
amusing story told in Mr. Nelson’s Report of the superstitious fear 
the natives formerly felt toward disturbing the nests of these birds, 
which, they believed would revenge themselves by prolonging the 
winter. Mr. Grinnell writes ; 
Toward spring the jays became remarkably reclusive, and their visits 
around camp were less and less frequent. I suspected that by the middle of 
March they would nest, and I consequently spent much time in fruitless 
search. . . . Finally I saw a jay with a large bunch of white down in 
its bill, flying back along the timber. . . . Not until May 13th, however, 
did I Anally find an occupied jay’s nest, and its discovery then was by mere 
accident. It was twelve feet up in a small spruce amongst a clump of larger 
ones on a low ridge. There were no “tell-tale sticks and twigs on the snow 
beneath,” as Nelson notes, and in fact nothing to indicate its location. The 
nest rested on several horizontal or slightly drooping branches against the 
south side of the main trunk. . . . The walls and bottom consisted of 
a closely felted mass of black hair-like lichen, many short bits of spruce 
twigs, feathers of ptarmigan and hawk owl, strips of a fibrous bark, and a 
few grasses. The interior was lined with the softest and finest grained 
material. The whole fabric is of such a quality as to accomplish the greatest 
conservation of warmth, which certainly must be necessary where incubation 
is carried on in below zero weather. 
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