10 PROCEEDINGS OF THE 



I did that of one pair of the Louisiana Water Thrushes. It 

 was in a shallow gully between two tumbling streams that 

 these Water Thrushes had built their nest. The gully had been 

 scoured out when the snow-waters of the spring thaw had 

 turned these little trout streams to torrents no man dare ford. 

 Along the gully's sides the roots of a great hemlock had been 

 washed bare, and in these roots, not fifteen inches above a little 

 pool of water, the birds had built. Overhead a great hemlock 

 towered, against whose rock-binding roots debris had piled up, 

 wreckage of spring floods. Along the Buck Hill all the way to 

 its junction with the smaller stream, Griscom's Creek, a hun- 

 dred feet below the nest, and on a hundred yards further, great 

 hemlocks pillared a lofty aisle of green gloom over amber water. 

 At intervals the sun broke through, sinking wells of light from 

 the tree-tops to the bottom of the clear pools. Up stream a few 

 yards from the nest there was an ojjen space where the sun 

 made its way down to the hemlock roots in early morning and 

 late afternoon, but at other hours no sunlight reached the nest 

 to dry the dampness everywhere about. On the far side of the 

 Buck Hill, rhododendrons lifted pale crowns of bloom high 

 among the hemlocks; the little stream flowed from under a very 

 tunnel of rhododendron. Just above the nest the boulders and 

 pebbles were bare of moss, the sand caught by the little pool 

 telling how the scouring had been accomplished. The brown 

 of the hemlock trunks everywhere about warmed the green 

 gloom their branches made, blending in with the weathered 

 reds and grays of the rocks and the grays of the pebbles and 

 sand to make the wood-floor a gray-brown monotone save 

 where the water slid along, wimpled amber, or tossed up in 

 white spray. A little to each side green predominated. Trees 

 and boulders were lichened, the stones in the bed of the little 

 stream were heavily tressed with water-moss, and the trunks of 

 fallen hemlocks were damp and sodden and green with decay. 

 Seemingly everything about was damp but the five young birds 

 sitting closely in the nest in the hemlock roots. 



Glad indeed I was to see them, for it was an hour and a half 

 since the anxious cries of the old birds and their full mouths 

 had halted me in my walk up stream with the surety that the 



