230 BIRDS OF THE ROCKIES 



gentle creatures before our joint pilgrimage drew to 

 an end. 



It is time to pass from quadrupeds to bipeds. While 

 our feathered friends were not so abundant in the wilder 

 regions as we might have wished, still we had almost 

 constant avian companionship along the way. The war- 

 bling vireos were especially plentiful, and in full tune, 

 making a silvery trail of song beside the dusty road. 

 We had them at our elbow as far as Graymont, where 

 we made a sharp detour from the open valley, and clam- 

 bered along a steep mountain side, with a deep, wooded 

 gorge below us. Here the vireos suddenly decided 

 that they could escort us no farther, as they had no 

 taste for crepuscular canons and alpine heights. Not a 

 vireo was seen above Graymont, which has an altitude 

 of nearly ten thousand feet. We left them singing in 

 the valley as we turned from it, and did not hear them 

 again until we came back to Graymont. 



Almost the same may be said of the broad-tailed 

 humming-birds, whose insect-like buzzing we heard at 

 frequent intervals along the route to a shoulder of the 

 mountain a little above Graymont, when it suddenly 

 ceased and was heard no more until we returned to 

 the same spot a few days later. House- wrens, willow 

 thrushes, Brewer's blackbirds, and long-crested jays were 

 also last seen at Graymont, which seemed to be a kind 

 of territorial limit for a number of species. 



