AMERICAN ORNITHOLOGY. 357 



WHITE.THROATED SWIFT, 



A. O. U. No. 435. (Aeronautes melanoleucus-) 



RANGE. 



Western United States, from Wyoming and Montana to the 

 Pacific, and south to Guatemala. 



DESCRIPTION. 



Length, 7 inches; extent, 14 inches; tail, 2.5 inches. Bill and 

 feet, black. Eye, brown. Top of head and neck, brownish. Rest 

 of upper parts, sooty black, tinged with greenish reflections on the 

 wings and tail. Tips of the secondaries and edge of the outer 

 primaries and tail feathers, white. A white patch on each side of 

 the rump and concealed white spots on the inner webs of all tail 

 feathers near their base. Chin, throat, breast, and line down the 

 middle of the belly, white. Rest of the under -parts as well as the 

 under surfaces of the wings and tail are brownish black. 



J0f^^' 



NEST AND EGGS. 



The White-throated Swifts breed in large numbers in the lime- 

 stone cliffs so common throughout the West. Fortunately they dig 

 their tunnels at such a height up on the face of the cliff that they 

 are rarely secured by the inveterate egg hunters and consequently 

 are very rarely seen in collections. Their eggs are long, pure 

 white, and probably most often five in number. 



HABITS 



By Dr. R. W. Shufeldt. 



The only opportunity I ever had of studying the habits and nest- 

 ing of the White-throated Swift occurred early in the spring of 

 1886, at which time I was Post Surgeon at Fort Wingate, New 

 Mexico. I had never seen them in life but once before and that 

 was in 1878 on the Chugwater Creek in Wyoming. There I found 

 them breeding in the highest and most inaccessible cliffs near the 

 old military road between Cheyenne and Fort Laramie. Thousands 

 of them swarmed about their nesting places at the high bluffs. 



In some parts of New Mexico they are quite abundant, but by 

 no means easy to collect, from the fact that in that region, too, 

 they resort to the walls of the deepest canyons 'jto breed and only 

 in certain kinds of weather fly low over the ground. Most of these 

 canyons are from three hundred to four hundred feet in depth, and 



