THE DUCK-MOTHERS 81 



chosen. Thus a mallard may locate in the thick 

 woods, in a horse-track in the stubble field, in an 

 old crow's nest, on the top of a haystack, or as 

 one Manitoba pioneer assured me, on the sod 

 roof of his first stable. Another part of the mys- 

 tery is how the tender little peepers reach the wa- 

 ter. The mallard and pin-tail are both prone to 

 nest far from that apparently necessary factor in 

 a duck's existence. On two or three occasions I 

 have seen a mallard's nest more than half a mile 

 from any pond or stream ; once I discovered one 

 in a hollow on the top of the highest hill in a 

 range of sand-hills, where there was not a drop of 

 water within a mile or more. The nest was hid- 

 den in a thick matting of ground cedar, at the 

 foot of a clump of dwarf birch, and thirty feet 

 distant, and a little above it, on the side of the 

 hill, was a much-used coyote hole. I had no 

 means, however, of ascertaining the ultimate fate 

 of the venture. 



When I set up the machine and attempted to 

 focus upon the nest of the subject in hand, I real- 

 ized that I had met difficulty. Not only did the 

 steep angle of the kodak give the nest a tilted ap- 

 pearance, but what was worse, the subject itself 

 was so well hidden and blended so well with the 



