112 MEMOIRS OF THE NUTTALL ORNITHOLOGICAL CLUB. 



I can remember when the strikingly beautiful and exceptionally interesting 

 Wood Duck was one of the commonest of the water-fowl which frequented 

 the inland ponds and rivers of eastern Massachusetts. In the Cambridge 

 Region it occurred very regularly and really numerously in spring and autumn, 

 and not uncommonly in summer. In spring it might be sometimes met with 

 along the wooded reaches of Beaver Brook between Rock Meadow and the 

 Waverley Oaks ; in autumn it alighted more or less freely in Fresh, Smith's, 

 Spy, and Bird's Ponds ; at both seasons, as well as in summer, its favorite 

 haunts were Pout Pond, the more retired stretches of Alewife Brook and 

 Little River, and the shallow ponds and ditches scattered throughout the neigh- 

 boring swamps. 



During the earlier years of my field experience, or, to be more precise, from 

 1865 to 1872, it was by no means unusual to find Wood Ducks in midsummer 

 at several of the localities just mentioned. When the young had become fully 

 grown and strong on the wing, they were especially given to frequenting the 

 Brickyard Swamp, where, in late August, I have seen scores of them in the 

 course of a single evening, circling low, in small flocks, over the thicket-encircled 

 pools. It is possible, of course, that some of the birds present during this 

 month may have come from further north, but there can be no doubt that many 

 of them were bred in the immediate neighborhood. Indeed I recall one occa- 

 sion about the middle of June (in 1870, I think it was, but the date unfortunately 

 has been mislaid), when I surprised a female Wood Duck, accompanied by ten 

 or a dozen ducklings only a few days old, swimming in a sluggish brook near the 

 outlet of Pout Pond. 



In 1867 the proprietor of the Fresh Pond Hotel purchased ten or a dozen 

 pairs of Wood Ducks and confined them in a large, slatted enclosure at the rear 

 of his stable. Although but imperfectly sheltered from the weather, they all 

 lived through the following winter. Early the next spring most of them 

 escaped into the neighboring swamps, where several were killed by the gun- 

 ners not long afterward. It is probable that the survivors bred in or near 

 these swamps that season, for young birds were more numerous about Fresh 

 Pond during the following summer than I have ever known them to be before 

 or since. 



My notes supply no local records of the occurrence of the Wood Duck in 

 summer between 1875 and 1887, but during 1888, 1889, 1890, 1891, and, I 

 believe, for several seasons later, the birds were constantly observed in May and 

 June about several of their former haunts. In April, 1891, Mr. Frank Holies 

 found two pairs near the Waverley Oaks, and on the 2 2d of the month he saw a 

 female fly from one of these trees which contained a cavity apparently well 

 suited for a nesting place, but too difficult of access to be closely examined. I 



