230 OUT WITH THE BIRDS 



rored the face of a white visitor. A few blue- 

 winged teal, feeding in the reeds, eyed the in- 

 truder a moment uneasily, then burst up and 

 off ; a coot or two, strangely alone when all their 

 brothers were rafting in numbers elsewhere, pat- 

 tered helter-skelter from their reedy retreat and 

 out to the open lake; a muskrat already abroad 

 for his nightly tasks, plunked on the right of 

 the canoe and reappeared on the left and headed 

 shoreward; the big blue heron that had haunted 

 the shore for many days, sprang up from an ob- 

 scure pool and flopped awkwardly along the 

 shore; then the woods were left behind, and the 

 shore became low and swampy. Here just at 

 the point where the big slough flanking the tim- 

 ber to the eastward sweeps around almost to the 

 lake and the separating isthmus is narrow, I 

 pushed the canoe ashore close in against the 

 weed-strewn, two-foot bank, and then lounged 

 back comfortably to look and listen. 



Had the swan grebes been absent it would 

 have been almost a silent evening. These noisy 

 chaps surely deserve the name of swan, rather 

 than Western grebe — their pedigreed cogno- 

 men — for they have the longest necks propor- 

 tionately of any of their swimming kindred; in- 



