A List of Land Birds from Central Washington

Abstract

DURING the summer of 1902 the Washington Agricultural College equipped and maintained in the fiela for one month, a biological collecting expedition. The material obtained includes principally mammals, birds, reptiles, fishes, insects and plants. The bird, are given in the appended list. The region selected as the basis of exploration is the old dry canion of the Columbia River in the northeast quarter of Douglas County, known as the Grand Coulee. This is simply a great gorge fifty miles long and from one to two miles wide, cut down three hundred to five hundred feet into the enormous layers of basalt that form the top of the country throughout central and southeast Washington. Although the Grand Coulee is now dry, with the exception of scattered, mostly alkaline lakes, having neither outlets nor inlets, it certainly at one time was nothing less than the channel of the Columbia River. There is no doubt that the latter, during glacial times, was so dammed up to the west that its original course became entirely closed. Its waters then rolled back upon themselves and a great lake was formed between the mouths of the Sans Poil and Okanogan Rivers. When this became too great for its embankments, an outlet stream started off overland to the southwest. This, however, soon cut for itself a channel in the soft basalt rock, and before the glaciers released the dammed up waters of the lake and let them once more follow their natural course in a great bend to the west and south, this short-cut stream had formed the Grand Coulee. It met the old river bed far to the southwest, near the Saddle Mountains and just south of where the Northern Pacific Railroad now crosses the Columbia. Since returning to its old course the river has cut its canion down five or six hundred feet below the floor of the Coulee. This has given to the people living in this region the notion that, if water ever did flow through the Grand Coulee, it must have gone north and not south.