Vertical Migration
In the effort to find winter quarters furnishing satisfactory living conditions, many North American birds fly hundreds of miles across land and sea. Others, however, are able to attain their objective merely by moving down the sides of a mountain. In such cases a few hundred feet of altitude correspond to hundreds of miles of latitude. Movements of this kind, known as "vertical migrations," are found wherever there are large mountain ranges. In the Rocky Mountain region they are particularly notable, as chickadees, rosy finches, juncos, pine grosbeaks, and some other species that nest in the Alpine Zone move down to the lower levels to spend the winter. It has been noted that such species as Williamson's sapsucker and the western wood pewee, which nest in the higher mountains, move down to the lower regions in August following the breeding season. There is a distinct tendency among the young of mountain-breeding birds to work down to the lower levels as soon as the nesting season is over. The sudden increases among birds in the edges of the foothills are particularly noticeable when cold spells with snow or frost occur at the higher altitudes.
Some species that normally breed in the Hudsonian or Arctic Zones find suitable breeding areas on the higher levels of the mountains, as for example the pipit, or titlark, which breeds on the tundra of Alaska and northern Canada and also south as far as Colorado on the summits of many peaks in the Rocky Mountains. On the other hand, a few species, as the Clark's crow, or nutcracker, nest at relatively low altitudes in the mountains and as the summer advances move higher up, thus performing a vertical migration that in a sense is comparable with the post-breeding movements of herons on the Atlantic coast. These illustrations show that the length of a migration route may depend upon factors other than latitude.