are in it, let's make the best of it, and abbreviate our angel's name to Leuco. 

 Never mind what it means; nobody pays any attention to Greek nowadays. It 

 sounds distinctive, not to say expensive, and a wee bit endearing. Shall it be 

 "Leuco" then? 



What, now, does our divinity eat? To all intents and purposes, snow. 

 Watch a company of them deployed over a snow-field, hopping sedately from 

 crest to crest of the tiny ridges, or else escalading into the pits which the sun has 

 made. They are pecking industriously at the surface as they go, and accumulat- 

 ing — well, not snow-flakes, nor yet snow-balls, but frozen insects, instead. It is 

 marvelous what a varied diet is offered to these patient gleaners of the glaciers. 

 The warm winds wafted up from the great Interior Valley bear moths and beetles, 

 bugs and winged ants, they know not whither; and these, succumbing to the sud- 

 den cold of the Sierran heights, fall in a beneficent shower over the Leuco's table. 

 Doubtless a few predatory insects, in a more active state, may be found. If it be 

 asked what the predatory insects, in turn, feed upon, I point to the black "dust" 

 which lies scattered over the surface of a June snowbank in such a uniform 

 fashion that suspicion is aroused. These tiny black specks, a score or so to the 

 square inch, are insects — of what order I cannot tell — insects not over a milli- 

 meter in length and perhaps a tenth of that in thickness. Thus I saw them in 

 myriads about Mammoth Crest in 1919. What their little businesses might be, 

 I could not conjecture; but they were quite active, and, as certainly, they were 

 on their native heath. When one breathes upon these insects they disappear, 

 and they do so by diving into the depths of the snow — or, say, to a depth of three 

 or four millimeters, down the interstices caused by the action of the sun. There's 

 romance for you; and there are, speaking in all sobriety, about forty billion of 

 these snow bugs to the square mile. 



As the season advances and the area of the snow fields is reduced, the 

 Leucos resort to the south slopes of the peaks, where yellow-winged locusts and 

 deer-flies and the hardy butterflies, notably Vanessa calcfornica, hold forth. These 

 they pursue on the ground, or else seize in midair by dextrous leaps from below. 

 They feed also at the lower levels over the heather beds and in the vicinity of 

 the cirque lakes. Once I saw a company of these Leucos feasting on caddis flies. 

 So eager had they become that they lighted upon the stones which protruded 

 above the water of a shallow lake, where they could seize the becoming-caddis- 

 flies as they crawled out of their chrysalis cases. Although this was well below 

 timber line, I never, save once, saw the Leucostictes alight in a tree, and I have 

 an idea they feel very ill-at-ease in such a situation. 



No bird, however, could be more thoroughly at home, or more matter-of- 

 fact in its behavior, about precipices or in ice-bound couloirs. Whether in nest- 

 hunting, mate hunting, or in the ordinary quest for food, a Leucosticte will flit 

 from crevice to point up the face of a twelve hundred foot escarpment as though 

 it were a garden dike. The crannies are explored in leisurely fashion in quest of 

 lurking bugs; and, if it is mating time, the bird pauses to sing, or rather, chirp, 

 from some eminence that would make an Alpensteiger dizzy. The "berg-schrund", 

 or chasm where the rock-wall and ice-wall part company, has no terrors for the 

 Leuco. Once I saw a precocious infant (of L. t. hep bur m) which had tumbled 

 into one of these places some thirty feet in depth; but mama was feeding him 

 and he was as cheerful as a cricket, expecting, no doubt justly, to win out again 

 after his wings were a little stronger. 



Beyond the fact that the Sierran Leucos are mildly sociable at all seasons, 

 and definitely gregarious in winter, little is known of their habits and economy, 

 save as observed casually by campers and mountain climbers, and more definitely 

 by questing oologists. Whatever may be the popular or even Audubonian 

 opinion of the last-named gentry, there can be no question in any honest mind 

 that science owes much to the tireless research of the bird-egger. Granting 

 that it is the lure of the trophy, the first or early possession of a something, 

 however trifling, which the other fellow hasn't got, which impels the prodigious 

 toils of the oologist, it remains true that in four cases out of five it is the field 

 oologist who has brought back the first adequate accounts, not only of nesting, 



