The Birds of Cheney, Washington

Abstract

C HENEY lies out on the N. P. R. R. sixteen miles southwest of Spokane in the county of that name. The altitude of the town is from 2350 to 2450feet. Much of the territory investigated lies from fifty to one hundred feet below this level. The nearest locality in which the birds have been previously reported upon is Fort Sherman, at Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. This is 2124 feet above sea level and forty-five miles northeast of Cheney. The avifauna there resembles that of Cheney more closely than does that of central Washington, as reported by Snodgrass. The mean annual temperature of Cheney for the past year was 48.80. Unfortunately there are no records for previous years, but this is nearly normal because the 1904 figures of the nearest station showed only a slight deviation above normal. The distribution by months is as follows: Jan. 34.10; Feb. 30.80; March 32.70; April 48.60; May 53.20; June 6r.oo; July 68.80; Aug. 68.90; Sept. 60.80; Oct. 5i.o0 Nov. 42.40; Dec. 33.00. According to the map of life-zones by C. Hart Merriam, Cheney would be in Upper Sonoran, but the biologic evidences seem to me to place it in the Transition. I believe that the Transition is much more largely represented in the Columbia River Basin than given ly Merriam. The evidence for my contention is that the following birds breed here: mountain chickadee, Audubon warbler, intermediate junco, winter wren, western wood pewee, and particularly the mountain bluebird, Cassin finch, Clarke nutcracker, black-headed jay and Louisiana tanager. On the other hand, the breeding here of the black-chinned hummer, Arkansas kingbird, western lark sparrow, spurred towhee, lazuli bunting, and especially of the Bullock oriole precludes the possibility of a Boreal classification. On expeditions southward where the altitude was 200 feet less, I found the long-tailed chat, black-headed grosbeak and turkey vulture, and here the Lewis woodpecker and crow were rmore abundant than at Cheney. Fifty miles west and somewhat lower, the Brewer sparrow, was seen in the sage brush. The dipper and canyon wren were observed where conditions were favorable to the south and east. Mt. Carleton (5806 ft.) and Mica Peak (5200 ft.) revealed the following birds late enough in June to be breeding: crossbill, white-breasted nuthatch, Clarke nutcracker, ruby-crowned kinglet, pileated woodpecker, Rocky Mountain jay and the varied thrush. Seeing this last bird on Mica Peak, June 3, seems especially noteworthy. The discovery of the western evening grosbeak in the winter in the Spokane Valley at 19oo feet, and the yellow-rumped warbler in the spring migration at Ritzville,fifty miles southwest and lower, probably indicate that these species were present but missed in Cheney. The two years were different in several respects. 'The winter of 1904-05 was a good cone year, so that black-headed jays and crossbills were not rare, as was the case the next winter. The pine siskin was abnormally rare in the first winter and the varied thrush in the second.