Page:Oregon, End of the Trail.djvu/60



tall fir, and flew away with the banner over mountains, rivers, and valleys.

More than fifty summer residents return to Oregon after southern winters. The more numerous of these are the rufous humming bird, the russet-back and the hermit thrush, the swallows, warblers, and many finches. Among the shyer and less frequently encountered are the bandtailed pigeon and the mourning dove, the lazuli bunting and the western tanager, the Bullocks oriole and the clown-like chat, the horned lark and the magpie of Eastern Oregon, the sandpiper, and the plover, with scores of lesser birds. From the far north come many others for the winter months, including the ruby-crowned and the Sitka kinglet, the cedar and Bohemian waxwing, the junco, and a host of sparrows.

Foremost among the numerous game birds is the China pheasant, which was imported into the state in 1881, when twenty-six birds were turned loose in the Willamette Valley. This hardy stranger now receives the larger part of the sportsman's attention, thus giving the more timid birds—the ruffed and sooty grouse, the sage hen and lesser quails—a greater margin of hope for survival. The aquatic game birds including the Canadian goose, the mallard, canvasback and wood duck and the teal, have greatly decreased but are now protected by stric Federal laws.

With six more names this incomplete roll call must close—tru Stellar jay, mythical demigod of the Chinook tribes, the sand-hill crane, the pelican, the whistling and trumpeter swan, the white heron. Plume hunters visited Malheur and Harney Lakes in 1898 and perpetrated a carnage that amounted almost to annihilation of the white heron, known to commerce as the snowy egret.

Many other winged inhabitants, worthy of description, must go eve.-without mention. Pages would not suffice to list all the myriad swim mers and fliers that make up the vivid pageant of Oregon bird life.

Within the borders of Oregon there now live, or were formerly found, characteristic varieties of almost all North American temperate zone mammals. Of the fur bearers it may be said that the state was founded on the value of their pelts. The sea otter is gone, and land otters are now scarce, but mink, bobcats, foxes, muskrats and racoons are still plentiful; and the beaver, for all the high hats to which he wai; a sacrifice in the old days, also remains. This gnawer, the backbone of the early fur trade, was once so plentiful in Oregon that Franchere, in 1812, took 450 skins of it and other animals on a 2O-day trip up the Columbia from Astoria. In 1824, Peter Skene Ogden said of his