248 THE Brrps Axsourt Us. 
nighimpossible. The birds are all here, and at times 
many kinds are congregated, but they have learned 
from sad experience how dangerous it is to be abroad 
where man is, and so keep at a long distance. They 
feed early in the day or in the gloaming, and hide 
most effectually during the mid-day hours. This is 
as we find them on the Eastern rivers, but in the 
West, where they are always far more numerous, they 
lose much of this excessive caution, and as a conse- 
quence are slaughtered by the thousands. 
The beautiful wood-duck is still abundant and has 
been able to hold its own, because of its timidity at 
certain seasons and ability to hide successfully in the 
smallest bits of cover. Scenting or hearing danger, 
it will disappear in a little clump of weeds, and if 
tracked by a dog, will dive and completely baffle the 
persistent spaniel. The nesting habits of the wood- 
duck are thus described by Wilson: 
“On the eighteenth of May I visited a tree containing the nest 
of a Summer-duck, on the banks of Tuckahoe River, New Jersey. 
It was an old grotesque white oak, whose top had been torn off by a 
storm. It stood on the declivity of the bank, about twenty yards 
from the water. In this hollow and broken top, and about six feet 
down on the soft decayed wood, lay thirteen eggs snugly covered 
with down, doubtless taken from the breast of the bird. . . . 
«This tree had been occupied, probably by the same pair, for four 
successive years in breeding-time; the person who gave me the in- 
formation, and whose house was within twenty or thirty yards of the 
tree, said that he had seen the female, the spring preceding, carry 
down thirteen young, one by one, in less than ten minutes. She 
caught them in her bill by the wing or back of the neck, and landed 
them safely at the foot of the tree, whence she afterwards led them 
to the water. Under this same tree, at the time I visited it, a large 
sloop lay on the stocks nearly finished, the deck was not more than 
twelve feet distant from the nest; yet notwithstanding the presence 

