A. O. U. No. 524a. Leucosticte tephrocotis littoralis (Baird).
Synonyms.—Rosy Finch. Hepburn’s Rosy Finch. Baird’s Rosy Finch.
Description.—Adult male in summer: Forehead and fore-crown black; occiput, broadly, and sides of head, clear ashy gray, color sometimes encroaching on chin and throat; nasal plumules grayish white; remaining plumage in general chestnut, chocolate, or rich vandyke brown, sharply contrasting with ashy gray on hind-neck and sides of head, inclining to blackish on throat, streaked with dusky on back and with more or less admixture of dusky on feather tips, especially on wings and flanks; feathers of upper and under tail-coverts, rump and flanks broadly and distinctly tipped with pink (of variable shade); wings and tail blackish; lesser and middle coverts broadly tipped with pink, the greater coverts, primary coverts and part of the flight feathers edged with pink or light carmine; rectrices with more or less edging of pinkish gray or light brown; bill black; feet and legs black. Adult female: of somewhat paler and duller coloration. Adults in winter: Feathers of back and scapulars edged with light brown; pink edgings of wings, etc., paler, and body plumage, especially on breast, with more or less pale skirting; bill yellow with dusky tip (this character is assumed as early as September). Length of adult male: 6.15 (156.2); wing 4.00 (101.6); tail 2.60 (66); bill .45 (11.4); tarsus .75 (19).
Recognition Marks.—Sparrow size; plumage warm brown with rosy skirtings; ashy gray on sides of head as distinguished from L. tephrocotis.
Nesting.—Nest: a thick mat of dried grasses placed in sheltered crevice of rock at great altitude. Eggs: Not yet taken but doubtless like those of Leucosticte griseonucha, viz., 4 or 5, pure white; av. size .97 × .67 (24.6 × 17). Season: June; one brood.
General Range.—Summer haunts include the higher mountain ranges of southeastern Alaska, British Columbia (west of the Rockies?) and Washington (possibly Oregon as well); “in winter south to Nevada, Utah, and Colorado, and east to eastern base of Rocky Mountains (casually to Minnesota), and along the Pacific coast to Kodiak, Sitka, Vancouver Island, etc.” (Ridgway).
Range in Washington.—Breeds thruout the higher Cascades (Wright’s Peak, Sahale, Mt. Baker, Mt. Rainier, etc.) and, probably, the Olympics. Retreats in winter to the lowlands, chiefly east of the Cascade Mountains.
Authorities.—? J. K. Lord, Nat. in V. Id. & B. C. 1866, p. 154. [“Hopburn’s (sic) rosy finch,” Johnson, Rep. Gov. W. T. 1884 (1885), 22.] Dawson, Auk, XIV. 1897, 92, 177. J. E.
Specimens.—P. Prov. E. C.
Taken in Chelan County. Photo by the Author.
SHRECKLICH PINNACLES.
DETAILS OF THE APPROACH TO MT. SAHALE.
Lives there a man so brutish that his heart does not kindle when he sees Rainier lit up with the ruddy glow of the evening sacrifice? If such there be, he is no bird-lover. Lives there a woman who can gaze upon the virgin snows of Kulshan, Shuksan, or Sahale, and not adore the emblem of eternal purity thereon displayed? If so, she will not appreciate the Leucosticte. This bird is the vestal virgin of the snows, the attendant minister of Nature’s loftiest altars, the guardian of the glacial sanctuaries.
One who loves the mountains cannot measure his praise nor bound his enthusiasm. Their sublimity bids him forget his limitations; and if one happens also to care for birds, it is matter of small justice to laud a bird whose devotion to the peaks appears as boundless as his own, besides knowing neither admixture of caution nor limitation of opportunity. Here is the patron saint of mountaineers! He alone of all creatures is at home on the heights, and he is not even dependent upon the scanty vegetation which follows the retreating snows, since he is able to wrest a living from the very glaciers. Abysses do not appall him, nor do the flower-strewn meadows of the lesser heights alienate his snow-centered affections.
Taken in Chelan County. Photo by the Author.
“THE CHILLY WILDERNESS OF SNOW-CLAD PEAKS.”
Looking out on the chilly wilderness of snow-clad peaks which confronts Leucosticte on an early day in June, one wonders what the bird sees to justify the assumption of family cares. Save for a few dripping south exposures of inhospitable rock, there is nothing visible which affords promise of food unless it be the snow itself. And when one sees a little company of the finches moving about demurely upon the face of a choppy snowdrift, pecking at the surface here and there, he begins to harbor an uncanny suspicion that the birds do eat snow. Closer examination, however, shows that the surface of all snow-banks, not freshly covered, is sprinkled with insects,—midges, beetles, wasps, and the like—insects which the spring gales have swept up to uncongenial heights and dropped, benumbed or dead with cold. These battered waifs the Leucostictes gather with untiring patience, and they are thus able to subsist as no other species can, up to the very summits.
The eggs of the Hepburn Leucosticte have not to our knowledge yet been taken. Mr. D. E. Brown, then of Glacier, found these birds scooping hollows under grass tussocks on the middle slopes of Baker, above timber line, on the 7th of June, 1905. On the 20th of July, 1900, Professor Lynds Jones and myself found a thick-walled grass nest settled upon bare rock without protection, on the south slope of the aiguille of Wright’s Peak, at an elevation of some 9,000 feet, and within a hundred yards of the summit; this could hardly have belonged to any other species.
In July, 1907, knowing that it was too late for eggs, I yet spent several days searching the precipitous wall which separates the upper Horseshoe Basin from the glacier which heads Thunder Creek. Adult birds to the number of a dozen gleaned scraps from the dump of the Cascade Mine house; but, altho each made off in business-like fashion when “loaded,” the stretch of the wall was too vast and its recesses too mazy to permit of exact work in tracing. I therefore examined carefully but with difficulty several of the weathered fissures, or couloirs, which ran perpendicularly up the face of the cliff. Here, under cover of rocks which had lodged in the throat of the fissure, or which had weathered out unevenly, old nests were found, simple affairs of coiled grasses, and too dilapidated for exact measurement. From one of these sites a pebble snapped from the finger must have fallen three hundred feet before striking the glacier below.