FOLLOWING THE REDHEADS TO THE GULF COAST 29 



The boat was waiting at the pier. It was a dream of 

 a yacht — 70 feet over all, carrying a captain (engineer), 

 deckhand and colored cook. We got our licenses — it 

 costs a non-resident $15 to hunt in Texas — and were 

 off down the coast. Eockport faded into the distance. 

 Porpoises played about in the waves. The two 45-horse- 

 power gasoline engines bowled us along at something 

 like 12 knots, and w^e swept the flats with our glasses, 

 looking for redheads. 



Eedheads, so I was told, feed upon a grass which 

 grows in the shallow water, and are in these waters all 

 Winter. They appear about the first of November, and 

 some of them are in even before that. Unlike the mal- 

 lards and pintail, which also go to that country, they 

 do not seem to require fresh water, and cannot be shot 

 around the fresh-water ponds, where most of the mal- 

 lards and geese are killed. Pintail especially are nu- 

 merous on the coast. My impression from many years 

 of observation that there are more pintail than all other 

 kinds of ducks combined, was borne out by the captain, 

 Clarence Armstrong, who had been a market hunter on 

 the Texas Coast, as was his father before him. He said 

 it was something like that. 



We found redheads at noon, and having had our 

 lunch we went ashore in a launch, leaving the Granada 

 II at anchor. The usual method of hunting down there 

 is to take a rowboat, which is pulled up on the beach 



