392 THE LONG-BILLED MARSH WREN. 



nearly a half circle in the southwestern part of Orleans 

 County, and enters Lake Ontario a little east of the center 

 of the shore line which bounds the county on the north. 

 The stream is beautiful, especially at its mouth, which is 

 called Lake View. A drive along its gracefully curving 

 banks, from the Ridge to the lake, is a never-failing source 

 of pleasure. Some forty or fifty feet high, these banks may 

 be abrupt walls of dark-red shaly sand-stone, not infre- 

 quently streaked with bright green, sometimes entirely 

 bare, but more frequently ornamented with a great variety 

 of beautiful vines and shrubbery; or they may be a fine 

 system of river-terraces, showing the different breadths of 

 the stream at certain periods of the later ages of geological 

 history. 



THE LONG-BILLED MARSH WREN. 



In the sedges and cat-tails, which border the placid cur- 

 rent as it approaches the lake, are the breeding haunts of 

 quite a group of birds which frequent the w^ater and its 

 vicinity in this locality. As one glides along these waters 

 in a light skiff, on a fine June morning, admiring the trees, 

 shrubs,vines and wild flowers which adorn the graceful curves 

 of the bluff on either side, from out the sedges and cat-tails 

 there comes the sharp metallic twitter of the Long-billed 

 Marsh Wren i^Tehnatodytes palustris). You strain your eyes 

 to get a glimpse of the utterer of these weird notes, but he 

 is completely concealed in the tall, thick growths, and 

 dodges about so mysteriously that you can scarcely keep 

 the direction of the sounds. There! Now he is in plain 

 sight, clinging sidewise to that huge cat-tail overtopped by 

 its candle-shaped blossom. What a wee bit of a bird he is, 

 seeming scarcely larger than the end of one's thumb, 

 though, from the tip of the bill to the extremity of the tail, 

 he measures some five inches or more; but the head is so 



