MIGRATIONS OF WATERFOWL 



a direction almost exactly the same as we see at Delta. On the Red River, 

 Thomas Schindler and Nolan Perret have told me of nights that go due 

 south. At Whitewater Lake, the departure line which Eugene F. Bossen- 

 maier has plotted for me is slightly more to the south than the direction at 

 Delta (Figure 14). 



There is a heavy crossing of migrants at Buckeye Lake, Ohio, and Traut- 

 man (1940:90) says that "the ratio between the number of migrating flocks 

 that were observed flying through the area without stopping and those 

 alighting on the lake was about three to one." Ray Sickles, Game Protector 

 for the Pennsylvania State Game Commission, writes me that there is an 

 annual passage of Whistling Swans over Pymatuning Lake, in northwestern 

 Pennsylvania, which is always in a southeasterly direction. He observed a 

 very heavy flight on October 18, 1952, when on night patrol. "Just after mid- 

 night the air seemed full of migrating birds ... At daybreak this was sub- 

 stantiated by what was the most concentrated movement of waterfowl I 

 have ever witnessed. Within an hour several hundred flocks of migrating 

 swans passed over. One person counted 50 flocks averaging 100 to a flock 

 within fifteen minutes. From dawn until about 10:30 a.m. it was impossible 

 to look into the sky without seeing several flocks of swans. By noon the 

 movement had passed on and only a few straggling flocks could be seen. All 

 were very high and traveling in a south-by-east direction. I would guess 

 that 10,000 to 15,000 swans migrated through in that movement and only 

 about 250 stopped at Pymatuning ... It seems that every time a big mi- 

 gration of swans occurs, the weather is clear and the sky blue." 



Delta, Whitewater Lake, and Buckeye Lake are merely pinpoints of 

 water on the migration map, but along river valleys the passage may follow 

 the same watercourse for many miles. Hall (1949:270) recalls a migration 

 he watched on the Mississippi River about thirty miles south of St. Louis. 

 "There'd been a blizzard swept down from the northwest, although no hint 

 of it reached our Missouri countryside. But the waterfowl knew about it and 

 they came pouring down the river that evening and all through the night 

 in countless hundreds of thousands, heading for distant feeding grounds in 

 the warm southland. It seemed to us from our vantage point high above the 

 river that most of the birds which use the Mississippi flyway must have 

 passed that afternoon . . . For as far as we could see, both up and down 

 the river and out across the wide Illinois bottomlands, migrating bands 

 passed swiftly and at every height. There could be no doubt about it : these 

 were travelling ducks. Although the long lines verged and crossed, the move- 



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