40 Birds of Lakeside and Prairie 



group of men and boys at the edge of a pond. A mud-hen, 

 which had dropped in during the night for food and rest, was 

 paddling about the water, and acting as a target for the revol- 

 vers of half a dozen of the men. The bullets spattered on the 

 surface all about the bird, but it lacked the wisdom to take 

 flight. It swam about in a circle in a half-bewildered way 

 and simply invited death. I asked the men to stop shooting, 

 but I speedily found that humanitarian pleas are of little avail 

 when addressed to a man with a gun. I threw a stone the 

 size of my fist in the direction of the bird, hoping that the 

 splash would frighten it to flight, but the stone had no more 

 effect than the shots. We left the men still popping away, 

 and that evening on our return I heard a big fellow boasting 

 to the group gathered round the open fire in the hotel office 

 that he had killed the bird at the fifteenth shot. Mud-hens 

 are notoriously stupid, and they pay the penalty of their 

 stupidity every time a pot-hunter gets into one of their 

 retreats. 



I saw my first bluebird of the year that morning in the 

 Hoosier hills. The bluebirds must have wonderful recruiting 

 powers ; it was only seven years before that their ranks were so 

 thinned by the attacks of the cold that it was thought the mus- 

 ter-roll never again would be full. This spring of 1901 was the 

 first time that I had seen anything like a satisfying number of 

 these sweet-voiced birds since they fell victims to that wintry 

 blast which penetrated far into the southland. It is said now 

 that there are more bluebirds than ever, but this saying is 

 doubtless due to faulty memories on the part of the observers. 

 One bluebird that we came across was gravely inspecting the 

 carcass of a crow which some one had hung on the thorns of 

 an Osage orange hedge. The crow had been killed and put 



