14G Tjie Wilson Bulleton — No. G4, 



AUGUST NOTES FROM A WATERING PLACE. 



BY ALTIIEA R. SHERMAN. 



Having a l:)liiKl about three hundred feet from onr house, I 

 have spent many hours in it, watching the passing show. It 

 faces a spot in a very wet meadow — which possibly may be 

 considered a swamplet — where a row of willows crosses the 

 water-course at a distance of thirty feet from the blind. 



Here the rails come to preen and sun themselves ; the first 

 Sora of this summer having been seen on July 19. and the first 

 Virginia" on August 1. Accessions to their numbers may be 

 found almost any morning after a foggy or rainy night. At 

 first they may be a little more timid than later in the season, 

 but in autumn months before the blind was built I have sat in 

 full view of them without apparent check upon their move- 

 ments, and they have not stirred when a friend has walked 

 along and stopped to talk about them. On the farther side of 

 the willows is a rank growth of saw-grass, so dense that in the 

 summer months the rails are never seen to penetrate it, but 

 they pass up and down the watery paths picking their food 

 from the shallow water or along its banks. Easily seen is the 

 fact that the adult Sora is the master rail, driving the Virginia 

 before him as he darts in hot pursuit into the rank growth of 

 weeds and grasses. From jeons of living in fens and boggy 

 places with his domineering cousin the Virginia Rail may 

 have acquired the startled, grotesque gait that he takes when 

 after standing in dignified attitudes for several minutes he sud- 

 denly rushes ofif, as if he had seen a frightful apparition. 

 Among themselves the young Soras are quite playful, but still 

 more sportive are the Virginia Rails. With a cry two or three 

 of them will bound into the open space under the willow trees, 

 suggesting the advent of clowns upon the s'age, and will 

 chase each other about, shaking their wings and flying from 

 the ground for a foot or two in a very amusing manner. They 

 are something of acrobats, too, as one is sometimes seen to 

 mount to the top of a fence-post or to the branch of a willow 

 until five feet or more from the e"round. Amonsf these the 



