The Dawson Leuco 



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 "bergschrund," 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. hepburni) 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 tire- 

 less research of the bird-egger. Granting that it is the lure of the trophy, 

 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, but of 

 behavior and economy, of song and courtship, and of most that goes 

 to make up the vital interest of a bird. 



So far as the records show, it was Henry W. Carriger who, in June, 

 1910, found the first occupied nest of the Leucosticte within the limits of 

 the United States. Certainly he was the first to find a nest of the "Sierra 

 Nevada Rosy Finch." This nest was taken on the 22nd of June by 

 Milton S. Ray from under a boulder, one of myriads constituting the 

 great weathered-out rock-field which covers the upper slopes of Pyramid 

 Peak fait. 10,020 ft.), in Eldorado County, and within 150 feet of the 

 top of that mountain. This nest, n/4, now reposes in the cabinets of 

 the Woodland Heights Museum of Analytical Oology. To Mr. Ray's 

 vivid and enthusiastic description 1 of the exploit there is little to be 

 added save the biographies of the participants. 



The second set of eggs, n/5, now resting in the Thayer Museum, was 



1 The Condor .Vol. XII., Sept., 1910. pp. 147-161. 



161 



