AMONG THE BIRDS OF THE YOSEMITE 229 



tail, and a strong, sharp bill, with which he digs 

 into the pine cones for the seeds on which he 

 mainly subsists. He is quick, boisterous, jerky, 

 and irregular in his movements and speech, 

 and makes a tremendously loud and showy ad- 

 vertisement of himself, — swooping and diving 

 in deep curves across gorges and valleys from 

 ridge to ridge, alighting on dead spars, looking 

 warily about him, and leaving his dry springy 

 perches, trembling from the vigor of his kick as 

 he launches himself for a new flight, screaming 

 from time to time loud enough to be heard more 

 than a mile in still weather. He dwells far back 

 on the high stormbeaten margin of the forest, 

 where the mountain pine, juniper, and hemlock 

 grow wide apart on glacier pavements and domes 

 and rough crumbling ridges, and the dwarf pine 

 makes a low crinkled growth along the flanks 

 of the Summit peaks. In so open a region, of 

 course, he is well seen. Everybody notices him, 

 and nobody at first knows what to make of him. 

 One guesses he must be a woodpecker ; another a 

 crow or some sort of jay, another a magpie. He 

 seems to be a pretty thoroughly mixed and fer- 

 mented compound of all these birds, has all their 

 strength, cunning, shyness, thievishness, and 

 wary, suspicious curiosity combined and con- 

 densed. He flies like a woodpecker, hammers 

 dead limbs for insects, digs big holes in pine 

 cones to get at the seeds, cracks nuts held be- 



