The Dawson Leuco 



quietly withdrew from the field and lost herself, immediately, in a hole, one 

 of a dozen lying at the back of a great shattered niche in the wall, from 

 which tons of rock — a schistose granite — had recently fallen. This loca- 

 tion, if location it was, was forty feet below location No. i, and fairly in a 

 vertical line with it. 



Fearing above all else a premature attack, we left these prospects 

 to ripen, and visited instead the lower nest, where there was a suspicion of 

 young. Sure enough, there were five youngsters about five days old, in a 

 sturdy nest, which must have held its complement of eggs about June 2nd, 

 the earliest recorded or inferential date for Leucos. 



Days of tireless and all but unrewarded quest followed. Beetling 

 cliffs began to lose something of their terrors, and if a bird disappeared 

 midway on a six hundred foot precipice, instead of resigning in despair, as 

 we had been inclined to do at first, we calculated soberly the chances of 

 approach by wells or ledges, or dangling ropes. A female, traced to a hole 

 eighty feet up on a sheer cliff, emerged presently with a white fcecal sac. 

 No need to bother that nest, then. Another, 200 feet up and 200 feet over, 

 seemed more feasible, and we determined to try it later. In the meantime 

 we kept looking for confirmatory evidence regarding the early prospects. 

 We learned that the feeding visits of a male to his mate on the nest were 

 exceedingly infrequent. The females themselves, apparently, indulged 

 two feeding periods, — one about eight or nine o'clock in the morning, and 

 the other after sunset. In most instances, whether by male or female, the 

 approach to the nest was made by leisurely stages. Significant actions 

 were lost in the maze of casual appearances, or under a camouflage of 

 indifference. At last, however, on the evening of the 23rd, spying chillily 

 from our snow-and-rock-bound ledge, we had the satisfaction of seeing the 

 male bird visit the original location site, where he fed and departed. The 

 next morning we caught the unattended female, she of the shattered niche, 

 flying straight to her domicile, and disappearing. As luck would have it, 

 we were standing at the time on the snowfield immediately below, and saw 

 precisely which one of the twenty odd crevices she entered. It was time 

 for action. 



The writer elected, for reasons which need not be dwelt upon, to di- 

 rect operations from below, while two of the party, my son, William 

 Oberlin, and our field assistant, Robert Canterbury, equipped with ropes 

 and pikes, made the lengthy detour and approached from above. The 

 cliff was full five hundred feet high, but the upper portion was receding and 

 graduated, by reason of the jointed character of the rock, into a sort of 

 grim staircase. The "steps" themselves, however, sloped sharply, and it 

 was no small task to get within forty feet of the nest from above. Here the 

 boys set their pikes in a fissure and attached a 150-foot rope, which reached 



166 



