Habitat
Subalpine meadows, grasslands, shrub-steppe, savanna, and pinon-juniper woodland (Nature Serve 2007b). Prairie-forest ecotones with clustered of trees, short grasses, and few shrubs. Also burned areas, clear cuts, edges of alpine tundra, and sagebrush flats (Power and Lombardo 1996). In B.C., nests from 260 to 2,700 m in elevation (Campbell et al. 1997) and in the Yukon, this species favors open lowland habitats, such as agricultural fields, settlement areas, old burns, and meadows with some trees or adjacent to forests (Alexander et al. 2003).
References
Alexander, S. A., F. I. Doyle, C. D. Ecker, H. Grünberg, N. L. Hughes, M. Jensen, I. Johnson, D. H. Mossop, W. A. Nixon, and P. H. Sinclair. 2003. Birds of the Yukon Territory (P. H. Sinclair, W. A. Nixon, C. D. Eckert, and N. L. Hughes, eds.). UBC Press, Vancouver, B.C.
Campbell, R. W., N. K. Dawe, I. McTaggart-Cowan, J. M. Cooper, G. W. Kaiser, M. C. E. McNall, and G. E. J. Smith. 1997. The Birds of British Columbia. Volume 3. Passerines: flycatchers through vireos. University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver. 693 pages.
NatureServe. 2007b. NatureServe Explorer: An online encyclopedia of life [web application]. Version 6.2. NatureServe, Arlington, Virginia. Available http://www.natureserve.org/explorer
Power, H. W. and M. P. Lombardo. 1996. Mountain Bluebird (Sialia currucoides). In The Birds of North America, No. 222 (A. Poole and F. Gill, Eds.). Philadelphia: The Academy of Natural Sciences; Washington, D.C.: The American Ornithologists’ Union.
