230 OUR NATIONAL PARKS 



tween his toes, cries like a crow or Stellar jay, — 

 but in a far louder, harsher, and more forbidding 

 tone of voice, — and besides his crow caws and 

 screams, has a great variety of small chatter talk, 

 mostly uttered in a fault-finding tone. Like the 

 magpie, he steals articles that can be of no use to 

 him. Once when I made my camp in a grove 

 at Cathedral Lake, I chanced to leave a cake of 

 soap on the shore where I had been washing, and 

 a few minutes afterward I saw my soap flying 

 past me through the grove, pushed by a Clarke 

 crow. 



In winter, when the snow is deep, the cones of 

 the mountain pines are empty, and the juniper, 

 hemlock, and dwarf pine orchard buried, he comes 

 down to glean seeds in the yellow pine forests, 

 startling the grouse with his loud screams. But 

 even in winter, in calm weather, he stays in his 

 high mountain home, defying the bitter frost. 

 Once I lay snowbound through a three days' 

 storm at the timber-line on Mount Shasta ; and 

 while the roaring snow-laden blast swept by, one 

 of these brave birds came to my camp, and began 

 hammering at the cones on the topmost branches 

 of half -buried pines, without showing the slight- 

 est distress. I have seen Clarke crows feeding 

 their young as early as June 19, at a height of 

 more than ten thousand feet, when nearly the 

 whole landscape was snow-covered. 



They are excessively shy, and keep away from 



