Incoming!

Contributed by Stephen W. Eaton
[Published in 1968: Smithsonian Institution United States National Museum Bulletin 237 (Part 2): 1029-1043]

The northern slate-colored junco, or "common snowbird" as persons who know it only in winter often call it, is one of the most distinctive of our common sparrows. With its uniform pale gray upperparts sharply defined against its white belly, aptly described as "leaden skies above, snow below." A friendly little bird that breeds across the continent from Alaska to Labrador and Newfoundland and from the limit of trees southward into the northern United States, it is the summer companion of the canoeist in the Canadian forests and of the mountain hiker in Appalachia.