Our Bird Comrades

by Leander S. Keyser

From three to five eggs are deposited. The ground color is white, either pure or creamy, sparingly mottled with rich madder-brown and lilac-gray, the spots being thicker and larger on the larger end. While the nest is undergoing examination, the owners circle and hover overhead, much after the fashion of the red-winged blackbirds, expressing their disapproval in loud and musical calls, and displaying their rich scarlet decorations.

My descriptions have related only to the male bird, whose beautiful forked tail is nine to ten inches long, and whose colors are clear and more or less intense. His spouse resembles him, but is slightly smaller, while her tail, though forked like her mate's, is from two and a half to three inches shorter. The salmon and scarlet ornaments on the sides, flanks, and axillars are paler than those of her lord, and the scarlet spot shows very indistinctly on her occiput. The young of both sexes don the dress of the mother bird during the first season, save that they fail to adorn themselves with a scarlet gem on the crown.

Like all the members of the flycatcher group, the scissorstails capture insects while on the wing, making many an attractive picture as they perform their graceful and interesting evolutions in the air.

It was a year or two later that I saw a scissorstail performing his ablutions in the northwestern part of Arkansas. How do you suppose he went about it? Not in the way birds usually do, by squatting down in the shallow water, twinkling their wings and tail, and sprinkling the liquid all over their plumage. No; this bird has a reputation to maintain for originality, and therefore he took his bath in this manner: First he perched on a telegraph wire by the roadside; then he swung gracefully down to a little pond, dashed lightly into the water, giving himself a slight wetting, after which he flew up to his original perch on the wire. A minute or less was then spent in preening his plumes; but they were not moist enough to suit his purpose, so he darted down to the pond again, making the spray rise as lie struck the water; then up to his perch he swung again, to arrange his feathers; and this was repeated a number of times, till his toilet was completed. It would not be safe to risk saying that the scissorstail always takes his bath in this way; but I know this one did. I once saw a kingbird doing the same thing, and so it may be a fashion in flycatcher circles.

I am minded, in order to make this monograph more complete, to borrow a couple of paragraphs from Mrs. Bailey's "Handbook of Birds of the Western United States." She has studied the bird in the Southwest, and gives the following graphic description of the bird and its habits:

"One of his favorite performances is to fly up and, with rattling wings, execute an aërial seesaw, a line of sharp-angled VVVVVVV's, helping himself at the short turns by rapidly opening and shutting his long white scissors. As he goes up and down he utters all the while a penetrating scream, Ka-quee-ka-quee-ka-quee-ka-quee-ka-quee, the emphasis being given each time at the top of the ascending line.

"Frequently when he is passing along with the even flight of a sober-minded crow, and you are quietly admiring the salmon lining of his wings, he shoots rattling into the air, and, as you stare after him, drops back as suddenly as he rose. He does this apparently because the spirit moves him, as a boy slings a stone at the sky, but fervor is added by the appearance of a rival or an enemy, for he is much like a Tyrannus in his masterful way of controlling the landscape. He will attack caracaras and white-necked ravens, lighting on their backs and giving them vicious blows while screaming in their ears."

AN ALPINE ROSY FINCH*

*Part of the material used in this chapter has already appeared in the author's work entitled "Birds of the Rockies," but it is here printed in different form, that of a monograph, with a number of additional facts. The writer feels that the readers of the present volume will relish at least a taste of bird study among the alpine heights of the Rocky Mountains. The article is reprinted from the "Denver Post," whose courtesy is hereby acknowledged.