The next morning the sun shone brightly though the weather was still very cold—the mercury had fallen below 30° during the night. But as I raised the shade of one of my eastern windows I saw a half-dozen of the Swallows sitting upon the ledge in the sunshine, while the air seemed again filled with flashing wings. I was so relieved and glad. Surely the tiny creatures, with their tints of steely blue or shining green contrasting with the pure white of the under parts, were more hardy than I had feared. But alas! it was but a remnant that escaped. Hundreds were found dead. Men were sent out with baskets to gather the limp little bodies from piazzas, window ledges, and copings. It was a pitiful sight for St. Valentine Day, when, as the old song has it,
"The birds are all choosing their mates."
Clark's Crows and Oregon Jays on Mount Hood[D]
BY FLORENCE A. MERRIAM
[D] Read before the American Ornithologist's Union, Nov. 16, 1898.
C
loud Cap Inn, the loghouse hotel fastened down with cables high on the north side of Mount Hood, is too near timber-line to claim a great variety of feathered guests, but Oregon Jays and Clark's Crows or Nutcrackers are regular pensioners of the house. The usual shooting by tourists does not menace them, for the nature-loving mountaineers, who keep the Inn and act as guides to the summit, guard most loyally both birds and beasts. They like to tell of a noble Eagle which used to fly up the cañon and circle over the glacier every day, and they recall with pleasure the snowy morning when an old Blue Grouse brought her brood to the Inn, and the birds ate the wheat that was thrown them with the confidence of chickens. The Grouse were, apparently, regular neighbors of the Inn, and while there I had the pleasure of seeing a grown family. They fed on the slope close above me with the unconcern of domestic fowls, conversing in turkey-like monosyllables as they moved about, and two of them came within a few feet and looked up at me—that not forty rods from the Inn! The pleasure of the sight was doubled by the reflection that such things could be so near a hotel, even on a remote mountain.