Birds of the Rockies

by Leander S. Keyser

It was a pleasure to be alive and well in such a place, where one breathed invigoration at every draught of the fresh, untainted mountain air; nor was it less a delight to sit on the bank of one of the transparent lakes and eat my luncheon and quaff from a pellucid spring that gushed as cold as ice and as sweet as nectar from the sand, while the white-crowned sparrows trilled a serenade in the copses.

Toward evening I clambered down to the cottage by Moraine Lake. The next morning, in addition to the birds already observed in the valley, I listened to the theme-like recitative of a warbling vireo, and also watched a sandpiper teetering about the edge of the water, while a red-shafted flicker dashed across the lake to a pine tree on the opposite side. As I left this attractive valley, the hermit thrushes seemed to waft me a sad farewell.

A little over half a day was spent in walking down from Moraine Lake to the Halfway House. It was a saunter that shall never be forgotten, for I gathered a half day's tribute of lore from the birds. A narrow green hollow, wedging itself into one of the gorges of the towering Peak, and watered by a snow-fed mountain brook, proved a very paradise for birds. Here was that queer little midget of the Rockies, the broad-tailed humming-bird, which performs such wonderful feats of balancing in the air; the red-shafted flicker; the western robin, singing precisely like his eastern half-brother; a pair of house-wrens guarding their treasures; Lincoln's sparrows, not quite so shy as those at Moraine Lake; mountain chickadees; olive-sided flycatchers; on the pine-clad mountain sides the lyrical hermit thrushes; and finally those ballad-singers of the mountain vales, the white-crowned sparrows, one of whose nests I was so fortunate as to come upon. It was placed in a small pine bush, and was just in process of construction. One of the birds flew fiercely at a mischievous chipmunk, and drove him away, as if he knew him for an arrant nest-robber.

Leaving this enchanting spot, I trudged down the mountain valleys and ravines, holding silent converse everywhere with the birds, and at length reached a small park, green and bushy, a short distance above the Halfway House. While jogging along, my eye caught sight of a gray-headed junco, which flitted from a clump of bushes bordering the stream to a spot on the ground close to some shrubs. The act appeared so suggestive that I decided to reconnoitre. I walked cautiously to the spot where the bird had dropped down, and in a moment she flew up with a scolding chipper. There was the nest, set on the ground in the grass and cosily hidden beneath the over-arching branches of a low bush. Had the mother bird been wise and courageous enough to retain her place, her secret would not have been betrayed, the nest was so well concealed.

The pretty couch contained four juvenile juncos covered only with down, and yet, in spite of their extreme youth, their foreheads and lores showed black, and their backs a distinctly reddish tint, so early in life were they adopting the pattern worn by their parents. The persistency of species in the floral and faunal realms presents some hard nuts for the evolutionist to crack. But that is an excursus, and would lead us too far afield. This was the first junco's nest I had ever found, and no one can blame me for feeling gratified with the discovery. The gray-headed juncos were very abundant in the Rockies, and are the only species at present known to breed in the State of Colorado. They are differentiated from the common slate-colored snowbird by their ash-gray suits, modestly decorated with a rust-colored patch on the back.

It was now far past noon, and beginning to feel weak with hunger, I reluctantly said adieu to the junco and her brood, and hurried on to the Halfway House, where a luncheon of sandwiches, pie and coffee strengthened me for the remainder of my tramp down the mountain to Manitou. That was a walk which lingers like a Greek legend in my memory on account of—well, that is the story that remains to be told.

On a former visit to the Halfway House I was mentally knocked off my feet by several glimpses of a woodpecker which was entirely new to me, and of whose existence I was not even aware until this gorgeous gentleman hove in sight. He was the handsomest member of the Picidæ family I have ever seen—his upper parts glossy black, some portions showing a bluish iridescence; his belly rich sulphur yellow, a bright red median stripe on the throat, set in the midst of the black, looking like a small necktie; two white stripes running along the side of the head, and a large white patch covering the middle and greater wing-coverts. Altogether, an odd livery for a woodpecker. Silently he swung from bole to bole for a few minutes, and then disappeared.

Not until I reached my room in Manitou could I fix the bird's place in the avicular system. By consulting Coues's Key and Professor Cooke's brochure on the Birds of Colorado, I found this quaintly costumed woodpecker to be Williamson's sapsucker (Sphyrapicus thyroideus), known only in the western part of the United States from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific coast. I now lingered in the beautiful pine grove surrounding the Halfway House, hoping to see him again, but he did not appear, and I reluctantly started down the cog-wheel track.

As I was turning a bend in the road, I caught sight of a mountain chickadee flitting to a dead snag on the slope at the right, the next moment slipping into a small hole leading inside. I climbed up to the shelf, a small level nook among the tall pines on the mountain side, to inspect her retreat, for it was the first nest of this interesting species that I found. The chickadee flashed in and out of the orifice, carrying food to her little ones, surreptitiously executing her housewifely duties. The mountain tit seems to be a shy and quiet little body when compared with the common black-cap known in the East.

While watching this bird from my place of concealment, I became conscious of the half-suppressed chirping of a woodpecker, and, to my intense joy, a moment later a Williamson's sapsucker swung to a pine bole a little below me and began pecking leisurely and with assumed nonchalance for grubs in the fissures of the bark. From my hiding-place behind some bushes I kept my eye on the handsome creature. An artist might well covet the privilege of painting this elegant bird as he scales the wall of a pine tree. Presently he glided to a snag not more than a rod from the chickadee's domicile, and then I noticed that the dead bole was perforated by a number of woodpecker holes, into one of which the sapsucker presently slipped with the tidbit he held in his bill. The doorway was almost too small for him, obliging him to turn slightly sidewise and make some effort to effect an entrance. Fortune had treated me as one of her favorites: I had discovered the nest of Williamson's sapsucker.