227 We find terra incognita] 



rapidly and quietly as we could, although we probably sounded 

 like a herd of buffalo. The two birds separated, one leading us 

 straight on toward a smaller pond just ahead, the other disap- 

 pearing off to the north, evidently with young in its wake. When 

 we came up on the first bird again it rose with a brief series of 

 alarm notes and flew off in a short circle toward the north. As it 

 rose among the trees a short-billed gull, doubtless hovering over 

 its precious brood of downy chicks nearby, attacked the flying 

 crane viciously, the only demonstration of this sort I have wit- 

 nessed in many years of watching whooping cranes. 



We reached the second pond and found numbers of crane 

 tracks, the extreme width between the spread of the outer toes 

 measuring the seven inches that indicates the enormous tread of 

 Grus americana. Around other ponds in the vicinity there were 

 other sets of tracks, and holes in the mud where the big birds 

 had probed with their heavy bills. 



We had at last met the whooping crane face to face on his 

 Northern nesting grounds! 



On the following day we set out to orient ourselves accurately 

 on the aerial photos, and in the course of an exhausting day we 

 managed to do so. In slogging around over the crane country we 

 noted the relative scarcity of other life a few pairs of short- 

 billed gulls, arctic loons, mallards, and green-winged teal. On some 

 ponds the lesser yellowlegs is a noisy tenant, on others, usually 

 with more heavily wooded shores, the equally noisy solitary sand- 

 piper. If we stopped on most marsh-rimmed ponds long enough 

 we found sora rails and Wilson's snipe present. Red-winged black- 

 birds were flying in and out of several extensive stands of bulrush, 

 their young already airborne, and in the wet birch thickets the 

 cheerful, bubbling notes of the Lincoln's sparrow is a typical song. 

 Once a bald eagle flew over, and we watched as a duck hawk was 

 run off by an angry pair of gulls. 



In general, the region in which the whooping crane nests is a 

 sort of arrested subclimax, neither established spruce forest nor a 

 distinct, muskeglike tamarack and spruce bog, although both 

 these types may be found nearby. Strictly speaking, the birds of 

 the white spruce forest myrtle warblers, olive-backs, solitary 



