194 What Birds Have Done With Me 



The human race today is something turned out 

 of a melting pot, cannibal and patrician, with all 

 grades between producing mongrel tribes cover- 

 ing the earth. The bird, free to follow its own 

 nature, produces neither 'hybrids nor mongrels. 

 Think of it, a thousand ducks migrating together, 

 nesting together, and never a cross-bred bird; 

 birds are always and everywhere, true to species. 

 Do you begin to feel the rebuke of it? Is their 

 conduct or man's the most astonishing? 



A few years ago I closed the bathing season 

 at Green Lake by accidentally going into the water 

 in a successful effort to get a wild duck out alive 

 that was being frozen into the ice, being unable 

 to fly owing to a broken wing. He was taken 

 home and put in a pen of Pekin ducks, eleven 

 females and one drake, and this drake was acci- 

 dentally killed by a playful colt, when the flock 

 crawled under the fence into the horse yard. This 

 left Mr. Green-headed Mallard in sole possession 

 of a snug little harem of his own. Talk of peas 

 in a pod, those white ducks looked exactly alike 

 and yet only one appealed to the little stranger 

 from the wild. The courtship is a sealed book, 

 or was it not made into a book as is so common; 

 about the only thing I am certain of is that it 

 was carried on late at night, which may be the 

 only thing certainly human about it. 



We first became sure of their marriage, seeing 



