4 Sty* Bfrarblrr 



Yet, along the undulating route, appeals to every sense beguiled the 

 way. For, how could one imagine how many new birds had been brought, 

 those five fateful years, by change in faunal conditions, into that new region? 

 And what extensions of old-time bounds had been made in that long inter- 

 val of time? Ah, — there sounds a Bobolink ! — sooner or later there were five 

 or six of him, — and each one blither than his fellow. Moreover, — before 

 I left the portage Coulee, did I not hear a single Yellow Rail, clicking away, 

 far down below, in the over-flowed coarse-grass area of the meadow-pasture ? 

 And, was not this the first proven extension of range, from the one breed- 

 ing colony, evinced in seven years ? Another portage, across a side-coulee, 

 involved a comical dilemma : wading, knee-deep, in miry meadow, I started 

 a meadow lark from her nest: — a meadow lark nesting over the water: One 

 ached to find the nest ; yet one could not turn round ; nor could one set any 

 portion of his burden down. And so the sitting mother's little act was need- 

 less. 



Slowly I neared the Rail Colony. Along the butte-crests, all purple 

 with vetches, all studded with boulders, green and yellow with their mar- 

 velonsly delicate lichen, one meandered up and down. Suddenly, from amid 

 the short upland grass, arose against the sunlight an agonized bird, as big as 

 a duck to seeming. Only when she alighted, rods away, did she reduce her 

 dimension to that of a normal " Bartram Plover," — (or whatever this bird 

 may happen to be called, just now u Upland Plover" it is: hurrah!) Just a 

 hollow, was her nest, amid the foot-high grass ; with four tempting eggs, all 

 soaking ! It being high noon, I turned aside into just that one of the num- 

 berless side-coulees down which there poured a tiny stream of purest, 

 coldest water. Ah, here, in all that alkali waste, was to be my mecca for 

 days to come ! Filling my bottle I crept beneath the shelter of a great sand 

 rock ; for the sun shown down. I knew that rock. Seven years before it 

 had rested fifty feet further up the butte-side, amid the soap-bushes. Then 

 it had sheltered, beneath its lower side, the eggs of a Turkey Vulture : now, 

 at its upper side, nestled what must, perforce, be one of the last of the nests 

 of that vanishing race, the Femiginous Rough-legged Hawk. As I ate, — 

 drank, — rested, — there came floating to my hearing a soft, uncertain, win- 

 nowing sound. It came to one's hearing again and again. But, this time, 

 eye vied with ear ; and, almost of an instant I was watching that hovering, 

 floating, vacillating Snipe. No human sense could give the human mind im- 

 pressions more creepily contradictory in their suggestions : could it be, — one 

 asked himself, incredulously, that a sound like that, — so clear, so strong, so 

 musical, so sweet and yet so far away — was produced by that speck of a 

 bird : communicating thus, in his free, wild way, with his mate, hidden, 

 somewhere below, in that acre-ous waste of grass, and rush, and sedge, and 

 water? All afternoon, that day, and all forenoon of the next, saw every 



