192 BIRDS OF THE REPUBLIC OF PANAMA PART 4 



Chiriqui, Santa Maria in Herrera, Penonome and Anton in Code, and 

 Chico, Pacora, and Chepo in the Province of Panama, the last-named 

 locality being the easternmost at which this bird has been found. I 

 have also seen it in Los Santos, at Pedasi. The westernmost record is 

 of 2 males collected by W. W. Brown, Jr., on December 3, 1900, at 

 Divala, Chiriqui. The race parvus is restricted to Panama. Other 

 races of Anthus lutescens are found on the coast of Peru and Chile and 

 in savanna country east of the Andes from Colombia east and south 

 locally to northern Argentina. 



The Yellowish Pipit is often the first bird visitors to Panama see, 

 since it inhabits the landing fields of Tocumen Airport and Albrook 

 Air Force Base; once when I landed at Albrook 2 of these pipits rose 

 and flew along just beyond the wings of the plane, so close that I could 

 see all their markings. Elsewhere, however, I have sometimes found 

 them hard to detect — when strong winds blow across the short grass 

 fields where they live, they prefer to crouch near the ground rather 

 than fly. On the ground they walk and run rather than hop, and some- 

 times wag their tail; their usual flight is deeply bounding, but I have 

 also seen them rise 125 m in the air, circling in 300 m circles, occa- 

 sionally setting the wings wide and sailing, after which they often 

 closed the wings and dropped for several meters. When ready to come 

 down they dropped directly to the earth or broke the distance in two or 

 three sections. When in flight, they occasionally utter a low, double call 

 like that of the temperate North American A. spinoletta, but somewhat 

 harsher. The song, also given in flight is "initially a series of dzees on 

 a rising pitch, usually given as the bird ascends in a looping manner 

 into the sky, then a long slurred dzeeeeeeeeeeee given as it slowly glides 

 back to earth, often with a dzip at end." (Ridgely, 1976, p. 280). Oc- 

 casionally Eisenmann saw them also singing from the ground a shorter 

 tsitsirrit and tsitzeeeeee. 



Yellowish Pipits nest in small colonies; in one at Santa Maria, Her- 

 rera, I counted 15 or 20 birds. A pair with developing gonads collected 

 at Penonome, Code, on January 23, 1963, is the earliest indication I 

 have of the onset of breeding. Others collected during February, 

 March, and as late as April 20 were nearly in breeding condition, but 

 on March 26, 1949, near Chico, Province of Panama I found a young 

 bird just from the nest and on the same day collected adults that had 

 not yet bred. On June 20, 1953, I took a female at Ancon, Canal Zone, 

 that had recently laid, and on June 27 of that year I flushed a female 

 from a nest at the La Jagua Hunting Club at Chico, Province of Pan- 

 ama. The nest was on the ground, sheltered partly under a low grass 



