88 On the trail of vanishing birds 



wore on, we climbed the hill west of camp to watch for him. At 

 four-thirty we heard the whine of his two engines and in another 

 moment his fast little amphibian appeared, circling low over the 

 lake. Now we could get down to business. 



It was another couple of days before Imperial Oil delivered 

 the 1,000-gallon tank and filled it for us. Meanwhile, McLeod 

 offered to lend Bob enough gasoline and oil to get us started. From 

 this point on, from June 8 until June 26, we flew almost con- 

 stantly, covering with painstaking care a vast area in west central 

 Saskatchewan, northeastern Alberta, and around Great Slave Lake 

 in Northwest Territories. The search area was limited by certain 

 features of terrain and habitat. On the east is the edge of the 

 Pre-Cambrian Shield, which knifes across western Canada from 

 the east side of Lake Winnipeg to Lake Athabaska, Great Slave 

 Lake, Great Bear Lake, and the Arctic coast at Darnley Bay. 

 Within this rocky region to the east there may be uranium and 

 gold and other precious ores and metals, but the lakes are deep, 

 there are no marshes, and it is no place to look for whooping 

 cranes. To the west the limiting feature is a combination of forests, 

 muskegs, and, from Camsell Bend on the Mackenzie River north- 

 ward, mountains. We did not expect to find our birds in forests 

 or in muskegs or in mountains. This left us with a roughly 

 hourglass-shaped area extending from Candle Lake on the east 

 to Primrose Lake on the west in Saskatchewan, narrowing around 

 Lake Claire in northeast Alberta and spreading out again to take 

 in the western end of Great Slave Lake, including Wood Buffalo 

 Park, the Slave River aspen parklands, and Mills Lake near the 

 head of the Mackenzie. It would be difficult to estimate the square 

 miles involved, but the distance from Candle Lake to Mills Lake 

 is over 700 miles. In the three weeks that followed, we spent over 

 55 hours in the air and logged nearly 6,000 miles all of it within 

 this area. As far as we went, no possibility was overlooked. 



On the first day we searched out the entire Lost Lake re- 

 gion the Muskeg River, the Martineau River, and Primrose 

 Lake, as well as muskegs east of Primrose and north of the i8th 

 baseline. It is a forest area, with some scattered muskegs. The 

 only extensive marsh is a strip of phragmites and bulrush along 



