THE WATERFOWL 



The great variety of the waterfowl of the Pacific 

 Coast, the wonderful numbers in which they are found 

 and the excellent shooting they afford, forms a subject, 

 which, to do it justice, would require the space of an 

 ordinary volume. 



With the exception of the Gulf tier of the Southern 

 states, waterfowl on the Atlantic Coast are but birds of 

 passage, tarrying for a time on their way to milder 

 winter quarters; tourists loitering for a day or two at 

 attractive by-stations as they wing their way south in 

 the fall and again on their return north in the spring. 

 They are leaving the isolation of the far north or the 

 mountain lakes and marshes where they spent the sum- 

 mer rearing their young and they are seeking more 

 favorable feeding grounds in the milder climate of the 

 South, where animal and vegetable life is not in the 

 state of hibernation which prevents it from furnishing 

 them with an abundance of food during their southern 

 sojourn. 



Over the larger portion of our hunting grounds what 

 is the beginning of the calendar year is in fact the be- 

 ginning of our spring. When the frost king lays his 

 hand upon all vegetable and insect life in the East, 

 spreading his white shroud over field and pasture and 

 breaking with his icy sleet from the vine and the brush 

 their clinging leaves; when from the trees have fallen 

 the last vestige of their autumnal crowns of gold and 

 crimson; when the last flower has shed its petals; when 

 the last hum of insect is heard and the last song of 

 bird has died away on the southern horizon 'tis then 

 the early rains of the Coast start the new sown grain 

 in the fields, give life again to the grasses of the plains, 

 carpet the foothills and the valleys with the gold and 

 purple and crimson of innumerable flowers, and our 

 \.~ritable spring commences. 



With us, therefore, waterfowl are not passing pil- 

 grims, tarrying for a few days only as they rest and 

 feed on their way to the open waters and green pas- 

 tures in which they intend to pass those months marked 

 winter on the calendar of the year. They are not mere 

 hurrying flocks alighting now and again as they wing 

 their way back to their breeding grounds in the spring 

 But ours is the mecca to which they journey; ours the 

 feeding grounds on which they assemble from the lakes 

 and marshes of the Arctic; from the whole chain of the 

 Aleutian Islands; from the inland seas of British Colum- 

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