364 Wright, Black Duck Nesting at Boston. [j^y 



life with much interest and pleasure. I was informed that the 

 brood was safely cared for in the Garden up to July 4, or a day or 

 two later, when the ducklings had come to be more than five 

 weeks old; not one had been lost. But the whole family then 

 disappeared, and it was surmised that the mother following her 

 bent, as observed in the two preceding years, had led them over 

 to the Charles River Basin. 



In October 1 found the mother and one immature duck on the 

 Garden pond. The young duck was about half grown, and the 

 wing quills were Aery little developed. It was regarded as proba- 

 bly a duckling of a second brood, raised outside the Garden; 

 for 1 have since been informed that a mother Black Duck with two 

 ducklings* probably three or four weeks old, was seen for a time 

 in late summer on the esplanade bordering the Charles, where it 

 is at a distance of a few hundred feet only from the Garden. So 

 the other having been lost, presumably on the Basin, she may have 

 eventually led her remaining duckling to the Garden pond now 

 so familiar to her. Here it remained continuously up to the time 

 of the closing of the pond with ice, having grown to about full 

 size and developed power of flight. Sometimes in the later days 

 of the autumn the mother was absent and the young duck alone, 

 and again on many days not only was the mother present, but 

 several others, both male and female, which came in company 

 with the original pair to its Garden haunt on excursions from other 

 waters. And it is not unlikely that some of these visitors were 

 members of the brood raised in early summer which departed from 

 the Garden and, it was surmised, went to the Charles River Basin 

 at the time of their disappearance. 



So the Public Garden has been the successful nesting place of a 

 pair of Black Ducks for the last three years, 1915, 1916, 1917, fol- 

 lowing an earlier attempt at nesting in 1911 which was not success- 

 ful. These breeding ducks are to be regarded as essentially 

 wild, not having been in the care of the city or owned by the park 

 department, but belonging to flocks which year by year have 

 arrived upon ponds and reservoirs in this vicinity and have win- 

 tered here in considerable numbers. They come and go at pleasure. 

 So these pairs of the Garden, undoubtedly of such origin, have 

 lived their own free life and come and gone according to their 



