Wood Ibis in the Yellowstone National Park
Wood Ibis in the Yellowstone National Park
On July 16, 1926, Mr. Elmer Harrold of Leetonia, Ohio, saw one of these birds (Mycteria americana) wading and feeding in a small marsh near the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone in northwestern Wyoming. This bird was not timid, but permitted the observer to approach near and watch its methods of slowly wading about, agitating the water with one foot at a time, and occasionally swallowing some morsel seemingly disclosed by the stirring. This was reported to Park Naturalist Edmund J. Sawyer, and by him to the writer; neither one of us had ever before seen the species in Yellowstone National Park. Neither Wilbur C. Knight in his “The Birds of Wyoming”, 1902, nor B. H. Grave and Ernest P. Walker in their “Wyoming Birds”, 1913, record this species in Wyoming. But Aretas A. Saunders gives two records in Montana (A Distributional List of the Birds of Montana, 1921), while W. Vincent Evans records it as “extremely rare” (Birds of Park and Sweetgrass Counties, Montana). Messrs. Harrold and Sawyer are to be congratulated on a new distributional record for this species.
M. P. Skinner
Roosevelt Wild Life Forest Experiment Station, New York State College of Forestry, Syracuse, New York, January 2, 1926
