iSSS.] Bendire on tlic Habits of the Genus Sphyrapicus. 2'X*1 



where almost every aspen gr(ive harbors a pair of these birds. 

 Crater Lake itself is such a strangely interesting and unique 

 freak of nature, the peer in sublime grandeur of the Yosemite 

 Valley in California, and the Yellowstone Park, with its grand 

 canons and geysers, in Wyoming, and so little known withal, 

 thati am sure the readers of 'The Auk' will forgive me the trans- 

 gression of interlarding a short description of it in this paper. 

 The lake is about seven and a half miles long and six wide, and 

 unlike anything found in this or any other country. It is situated 

 on the summit of the Cascade Range, about twenty-five miles 

 north of Fort Klamath, at an altitude of about 7500 feet ; the 

 highest peak in the vicinity reaches up to 9000 feet. The rocky 

 walls surrounding it on all sides are nowhere less than 1000 

 feet, and in places more than 2000 feet high, in many points 

 almost perpendicular, so that a stone can be thrown without 

 striking anything on its way till it reaches the water, fully 2000 

 feet below. It is said to be some 1800 feet deep, and in places 

 is probably more. One cannot realize the magnitude of this 

 hole in the ground without seeing it. A mountain the size of 

 Mt. Washington, the highest peak of the White Mountains in 

 New Hampshire, might be dumped in, and not fill it up then. 

 The water is beautifully clear, and deep azure blue in color ; the 

 the only living thing seen on it on a visit to the lake on July 27, 

 1SS2, was a solitary female Wandering Tatler {Heteractitis 

 incanus)^ apparently very correctly named. An island, covered 

 with good-sized trees, rises out of the water to a height of nearly 

 a thousand feet, on the west side of the lake. It is composed 

 mostly of volcanic scoritB and pumice, and evidently was the prin- 

 cipal cone of the now extinct crater, traces of whose activity in 

 former times, in the shape of heavy pumice deposits, can be 

 found for fifty miles inland to the east, on the road from the De 

 Chutes River to Fort Klamath. There is only one place from 

 which the shore of the lake can be rdached with comparative 

 safety, and even from there it is by no means an easy matter. 

 But enough of the lake. 



Mr. Gale, who is quite familiar with this species, writes me 

 that in Colorado they nest sometimes at an altitude of 10,000 feet, 

 and that they are generally distributed between that limit and 

 8000 feet. The nest-sites, he says, are as often met with in mod- 

 erately thick woods as in the more open clearings and isolated 



