The Birds of Washington (Volume 1 of 2): A complete, scientific and popular account of the 372 species of birds found in the stateDawson, William Leon
Science
The Birds of Washington (Volume 1 of 2): A complete, scientific and popular account of the 372 species of birds found in the state
Dawson, William Leon
Birds -- Washington (State)
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.
Now and then a passing bird, suspicious of my intent, stopped on some
projecting point of rock, to utter the sole note which does duty for
every mood, _churkk_ or _schthub_, a sound comparable only to the
concussion of a small taut rope on a flag-pole. Finally, near the top of
the Sahale Glacier, I got a line at two hundred yards on an occupied
fissure, and traced both parent Leucostictes into its distant recesses.
Climbing cautiously up a sharp slope of ice, my footsteps were guided by
the almost incessant clamor of young birds. Arrived at the upper lip of
the glacier, however, I found that it stood away from the rock-wall some
fifteen feet, and that a chasm some forty feet in depth yawned beneath.
Into this forbidding _bergschrund_, one of the fledgling Leucostictes
had tumbled. He was not more than two-thirds grown (July 18th) and down
feathers still fluttered from his cheeks, but he was a plucky little
fellow, and had managed to scramble up off the ice onto a piece of flat
rock which caught a bit of the afternoon sun. Here, to judge from his
lusty yelping, there could be no doubt that his parents would notice
him, altho they would be powerless to secure his further release until
his wings were grown. A Carnegie medal hovered suggestively over the
spot, I know; but pray, consider,—the rock wall was perpendicular and
smooth as glass, the ice-wall I stood on was undercut. No; even
philornithy has its limits!
[Illustration: _Taken in the Rainier National Park._ _From a
Photograph Copyright, 1908, by W. L. Dawson._
A GLIMPSE OF MT. RAINIER FROM THE NISQUALLY GLACIER.
A FAVORITE HAUNT OF THE HEPBURN LEUCOSTICTE.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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