I TA Peabody, Nesting Habits of I.ccoutes Sparro-M. lADril 



sparrow, flying heavily, with a sort of hovering manner, two hun- 

 dred feet away. Moving slowly and deviously, as if in search, it 

 soon alighted and ran tortuously on foot for a hundred feet and 

 suddenly disappeared into the dead grass. Driving as close as I 

 dared, to flush the bird, I suddenly caught sight of her sitting on 

 the grass, just back of my rear buggy wheel, and only five feet 

 from me. Thus she sat for fully five seconds. A mat of grass 

 at least two inches thick lay over the nest. There was no visible 

 opening. The wheel had passed within two inches of the eggs. 



For the benefit of those who have never seen the young of this 

 sparrow, just from the nest, it may be added, that they have a 

 ground color appreciably paler than that of the parents and of an 

 olive-yellow tinge ; while the young-of-the-year, in October, are 

 still paler with a most exquisite hoary bloom over the entire plum- 

 age. This bloom fades within a few hours after death. 



As regards distribution and relative abundance, a few words 

 may be added. Wherever I have traversed in the region of the 

 Red River Valley, previous to the present season, any haunts 

 favorable to Leconte's Sparrow, I have always found it more or 

 less uniformly distributed. On the contrary, during the season 

 of 1900, which was most exceptionally dry, no birds were seen 

 or heard until June 2 ; 1 and the only birds found during the entire 

 summer were restricted to some six pairs, all found on an area 

 covering hardly more than a square mile. And the dry weather 

 had, apparently, affected not only the abundance of the bird, but 

 its breeding conditions. Having come to regard this sparrow as 

 an exclusively meadow-and-prairie bird, I was astonished, in 

 October of 1900, to find it in a meadow, among the spruce swamps 

 at Hibbing, a hundred miles northwest of Duluth. Two birds 

 were flushed three times, and perhaps three birds were seen ; all 

 within a very narrow area. I am confident that these birds were 

 only migrants. But little that is authentic and circumstantial has 

 as yet been recorded concerning the summer life of Leconte's 

 Sparrow. It now remains for field observers in Minnesota, the 

 Dakotas, Manitoba and Assiniboia to define for us, accurately, 

 the range of this bird's summer home. 



' Baird's Sparrow, usually abundant in the Red River Valley, was this 

 season entirely absent. / 



