342 University of California Publications in Zoology (Vou. 24

ing the little muskegs that are scattered through the woods, well
defined areas for which certain bird species showed a marked prefer-
ence. No three-toed woodpeckers were seen on Nine-mile Mountain,
though both species occur as a rule in the Hudsonian zone.

A nest of the Arctic three-toed woodpecker was found in Kispiox
Valley. It was placed in a dead and charred Engelmann spruce, in
a strip of spruce woods bordering a muskeg otherwise surrounded by
poplar forest. The nest hole was eighty feet from the ground. It was
two and one-half inches in diameter and one foot deep, drilled through
an outer sheath of sound, hard wood, and downward through soft,
rotten ‘punk.’ On July 3 it held one young bird nearly ready to fly,
and a second, not much smaller, which had been dead for some days.

Four specimens collected (nos. 42118-42121), the young female
mentioned above, its female parent, and, at other times, two adult
males.

Picoides americanus fasciatus Baird. Alaska Three-toed Woodpecker

Four specimens collected (nos. 42122-42125), one adult male and
three adult females. They differ from Alaskan examples of fasciatus
in the notable restriction of white dorsal markings. The white bars
on the back are limited in extent and in only one specimen is there
even a trace of the white coalescing longitudinally. All four. however,
show white spots on rump and upper tail coverts, markings that are
supposed to distinguish fasciatus from americanus.

Sphyrapicus varius ruber (Gmelin). Red-breasted Sapsucker

All through the valleys this species was far more abundant than I
have ever found sapsuckers elsewhere. It is curious that there should
be this abundance here; this must be near the outskirts of the range of
the bird. Ruber is rezarded primarily as a coastal species, yet nowhere
on the coast is it found in such numbers. On the southeastern Alaskan
coast, near the Skeena River, it is doubtful if an observer would in a
whole summer see twenty birds—the number counted near Hazelton
in one forenoon.

During May and June a number of nests were found, mostly
through seeing the old birds carrying food to the young. One was
drilled in a live poplar, the tree a straight column with no branching

limbs save at the very top, the nest some seventy feet from the ground.
Another was in a dead birch, sixty feet up. Many others were noted,