LIFE IN PONDS AND MARSHES 



301 



growing along the margins or in 

 the shallower locations about 

 them. Many ponds and not a 

 few marshes are quite devoid of 

 every kind of plant growth be- 

 yond sedges and grasses ; so that 

 to find birds in such places would 

 be by no means the rule. 



In order to study and enjoy 

 the bird-life of large ponds and 

 marshes one must go far beyond 

 the habitations and resorts of 

 man even into districts where 

 the automobile is not known. 

 Such localities and undisturbed 

 regions, where this feature ex- 

 isted in all of its pristine natural- 

 ness, have only been discovered 

 by the writer in a very few 

 places. As late as 1868, some 

 parts of central Wisconsin lay in 

 a region that had not been invad- 

 ed to any extent, and some of the 

 lake-marshes and small, isolated 

 ponds were the homes of many 

 species of birds that habitually 



breed in such places some of them belonging entirely to 

 the avifauna of the Middle West. Where the plant- 

 growth in an extensive marsh consisted principally of 

 cat-tails, it was not an uncommon thing to see, in the 

 spring, thousands of our elegant yellow-headed black- 

 birds take to flight when something had alarmed them, 

 alighting in the nearby trees and bushes. The explorer, 

 passing through that swamp, would find hundreds of 



BULL FROG EIGHT INCHES LONG 



East of the Rockies, and in suitable localities, bull-frogs art found all over the 

 eastern parts of the United States that is, in ponds and marshes everywhere. 

 They do not appear until the weather becomes warm and the summer well ad- 

 vanced. The species is a thoroughly aquatic one, and of some economic importance. 



CHANGES IN THE TADPOLE 



At this stage, the tadpole's tail exhibits but very slight evidences of its total disappearance later 

 on; the eyes are larger and nearer the top of the head; the mouth is more frog-like, and the fore- 

 limbs can be discerned beneath the skin. 



their nests built on the cat-tail stalks and in such low 

 shrubs as might be growing there. 



Ponds and marshes of a similar description in southern 

 Alabama and Mississippi, forty years ago, were wonders 

 in the bird-life they presented. There the red-wing 

 black-birds were found instead of the yellow-headed spe- 

 cies, and their nests were fully as abundant. All the 

 birds of this group aside from the cowbirds and oth- 

 ers lay unusually pretty eggs, which are a pale 

 blue, with curious, scraggly lines of black mark- 

 ing them in a most bizarre manner. These south- 

 ern ponds and immense marshes, when sufficiently 

 secluded, often teem with various species of 

 herons, ibises, rail, and many other marsh birds. 

 Then, too, where such a pond is more or less 

 surrounded with timber situated in a forest in 

 fact we are pretty sure to meet with the wood 

 duck, the most beautiful species of all our fresh- 

 water wildfowl. This elegant bird most often 

 breeds in the hollow trunks of trees that over- 

 hang the pond or marsh where they occur. In 

 1870, when attending Cornell University, the 

 writer discovered the nest of a pair of these 

 wood ducks in a swamp at the foot of Lake 

 Cayuga (Ithaca, N. Y.). It was in the hollow 

 stump of an old sycamore, some forty feet above 

 the ground. When the young were ready to leave 

 the nest, their parents brought them down to the 

 water of the swamp, one at a time, until the 

 entire brood had been safely launched in their 

 natural element. There were seven or eight of 

 the little downy fellows, and at was a beautiful 

 sight as they swam out with their parents into 



