eee Ae Ue ele mt@eNe BY ale We ieloN 
more or less closed, auto traffic was at a minimum, but due to 
the water diversion and the blasting, so were the birds. Better 
luck 1n 1968! We looked tn vain in Custer State Park, adjacent 
to the National Forest, for the Wild Turkeys that have been 
started there. All we saw were the begging donkeys. We also 
missed the bison who live there. 
A family or two of Spotted Sandpipers were bobbing up 
and down on the margins of a stockpond by an old mill dam 
every time we drove past. They seemed unconcerned over the 
fly fishermen nearby. Enroute cut, we stopped along the roadside 
to change drivers in the high, treeless country west of Cham- 
berlain, S.D., and found a flock of Upland Plovers neatly fold- 
ing their big wings on alighting tn the grass. On the way home, 
over an opened-just-that-morning streich of Interstate 90, we 
even saw a Bittern in a roadside swamp, posed motionless like 
an ar raid warden. 
Mourning Dove, Nighthawk and Chimney Swift were 
familiar friends from home, but the White-Throated Swifts 
doing speed aerial gymnastics by their sheer rock cliff homes 
were a new delight. One pair appeared to be copulating in mid- 
ait on July 4. 
On tree trunks near the Blue Heron's beaver pond in the 
mountain meadow we saw a Red-shafted Flicker and a Yellow- 
bellied Sapsucker with one young. We also saw the Sapsucker 
in McVey Burn, a grown-over site of a 1939, 22,000-acre forest 
fire. This is now a lovely woodland, but notable mostly for ab- 
sence of birds. 
The Western Kingbird, greyer than ours and with a lemon- 
yellow belly, obligingly posed on the telephone wire at Beresford 
where we stayed overnight on the way home. The Western 
Flycatcher lived in the ash-leaved maples in the shaded stream 
bed by our mountain cabin near Lead and whee-seed constantly 
every morning and evening. 
We saw the Violet-green Swallows swooping tirelessly 
over the beaver pond but looked tn vain for the expected Rough- 
winged. Barn Swallows, always a joy, were in Spearfish Canyon 
near the Roughlock Falls picnic ground, and over the stream 
that meanders through the Pactola Lodge grounds. 
The Gray Jay, new to us, required some hard book work 
one hot summer noon. He called momentarily from the very top 
of a tall evergreen high on a mountain, but the brilliance of the 
sun masked his color. Then, of course he was gone—lost in the 
deep woods. Eventually we sorted out who he had been. This 
was the only day we climbed high enough to find alpine wild- 
