"I saw a condor on the ground near the train (on northern side of track) just after leaving Coulee City," he wrote, "but from some caution refrained from recording the fact at the time." It was only after the biologist reached Spokane, in a bracketed addendum to his day's journal entry, that he added one more species to the list. His count included magpies and meadowlarks, a single kingfisher, and numerous sparrow hawks watching for movement in the wheat stubble. That morning on the rolling train, Merriam kept his eyes open for birds. 28, he'd climbed out of Grand Coulee and taken lodgings in Coulee City. Florence, for her part, was in that year working with a host of local correspondents on one of the first popular bird guides to our region, A Handbook of Birds of the Western United States.Ĭlint had spent the summer censusing mammals along the Cascade crest, and season's end found him reveling in open ponderosa parklands of the Okanogan before traversing the Waterville Plateau. Clint had built on that background to rise to the position of director of the U.S. As young adults, they had developed a love of bird life and a taste for the American West. He and his sister Florence had grown up in New York state and were both accomplished naturalists from an early age. Merriam, whose friends called him Clint, was riding all the way to Spokane and eventually Washington, D.C. He tracked ridges of scabland basalt across the countryside, then waited patiently as the train stopped in small towns to pick up carloads of sacked wheat as well as crates of produce to sell farther east. Hart Merriam rode with a field notebook in his lap, noting the bright yellow flowers of blazing star that still bloomed among the sage and bitterbrush of the shrub-steppe. While the population of captive condors has remained steady, the wild population has slowly increased in recent years.Ī t sunrise on a fall day in 1897, the morning train from Coulee City to Spokane departed on schedule.
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