on reaching the suburbs, I was greeted by a blithe,
dulcet trill which could come from no other vocalist than the
song-sparrow. His tones and vocalization were precisely like those of
_Melospiza fasciata_, to which I have so often listened in my native
State of Ohio. It was a dulcet strain, and stirred memories half sad,
half glad, of many a charming ramble about my eastern home when the
song-sparrows were the chief choralists in the outdoor opera festival.
Peering into the bushes that fringed the gurgling mountain brook, I soon
caught sight of the little triller, and found that, so far as I could
distinguish them with my field-glass, his markings were just like those
of his eastern relative--the same mottled breast, with the large dusky
blotch in the centre.

Delighted as I was with the bird's aria, I could not decide whether this
was the common song-sparrow or the mountain song-sparrow. Something
over a week earlier I had seen what I took to be the mountain
song-sparrow in a green nook below the summit of Pike's Peak, and had
noted his trill as a rather shabby performance in comparison with the
tinkling chansons of the song-sparrow of the East. Had I mistaken some
other bird for the mountain song-sparrow? Or was the Buena Vista bird
the common song-sparrow which had gone entirely beyond its Colorado
range? Consulting Professor W. W. Cooke's list of Colorado birds, I
found that _Melospiza fasciata_ is marked "migratory, rare," and has
been known thus far only in the extreme eastern part of the State;
whereas _Melospiza fasciata montana_ is a summer resident, "common
throughout the State in migration, and not uncommon as a breeder from
the plains to eight thousand feet."

But Professor Cooke fails to give a clue to the song of either variety,
and therefore my little problem remains unsolved, as I could not think
of taking the life of a dulcet-voiced bird merely to discover whether it
should have "_montana_" affixed to its scientific name or not. All I can
say is, if this soloist was a mountain song-sparrow, he reproduced
exactly the trills of his half-brothers of the East.[7] On the morning
of my departure from Buena Vista another song-sparrow sang his matins,
in loud, clear tones among the bushes of a stream that flowed through
the town, ringing quite a number of changes in his tune, all of them
familiar to my ear from long acquaintance with the eastern forms of the
_Melospiza_ subfamily.

[7] The problem has si