©^ Warbler 5 



vantage-ground of acquired knowledge utilized in a vain, vain search for 

 nests of the Yellow Rail. One pair were domiciled right opposite the great 

 rock; another held sway twenty. rods further in the meadow; a third, still 

 further out; and a fourth, a hundred yards or so to one side of these : all of 

 them in the water-surrounded coarse grass. Fairly from beneath one's very- 

 feet came clanking-out that curious, throaty click ; always, — and always, — 

 in about the same place. No bird on earth, — or in the water, — is more 

 strangely local in its habitance than this. 



Unwelcome happenings, alone, marred the monotony of these long, 

 tiring searches : out from a bog, where the spring-water meandered its way 

 across the meadow, flapped a Mallard from her eight half-incubated eggs. From 

 an isolated bog, nearer laud, amid finer grass-growth, flew, from her eleven 

 eggs, as I neared, a female Blue-winged Teal. To avoid the breaking-up of 

 these duck homes, all the finesse of which a veteran bird-student becomes 

 possessed must, perforce, be exercised. 



That afternoon, upon the still monotony of Rail-search, there broke, of 

 a sudden, the winnowing of a male Snipe. And straightway, as I fell to 

 watching him, pulling my heavy legs out of the mud, and struggling to 

 dryer land, he came slanting down, from a great way off ; down to within a 

 hundred feet, or so, of the meadow-surface. Then, — delicious co-incidence ! 

 — his mate was seen to be flying before him. An odd little duet of trickling- 

 recitative notes came filtering down to me; as they fitfully chased each other. 

 Just one note of them all comes back to me, tonight ; as I take down my 

 Newton and peruse his brief article on the "Bleating of the Snipe." Just the 

 one note, " Djepp," emitted by the male, with beak pointing earthward, 

 could I recall out of all that swift delicious medley. An hour or two later, 

 beneath the most innocent possible prone wisp of wet dead grass, on a small 

 bog, amid the lush young meadow grass, was found the one Yellow Rail 

 nest of the season. The study of this one focal point of the long, hard 

 trip thereafter became centered in this tiny bog. Hardly twenty feet away 

 was a little line left of unmown grass. From this, a number of times, I 

 flushed one of a pair of Nelson Sharp-tailed Sparrows. A tiny beaten-down, 

 spot, in the sparse, dead-and-alive grass, bespoke well their purpose there. 

 Ten feet from this, next forenoon, as I was planting the camera for a bird's-eye 

 view, there rose, with startled quackings, a Blue-winged Teal from her twelve 

 fresh eggs: in a most-neat nest, well sunken into one corner of an unmown 

 rectangle of coarse grass and reeds. Twenty feet off, in another direction, 

 as I dragged my way to one side after my plate-box, there fluttered, vacillat- 

 iugly but silently, from a partly-mown bog, at edge of the rectangle of un- 

 mown growth, — that very WILSON SNIPE whose mate had playfully pur- 

 sued her, across the wet meadow ; not many rods from the very spot where- 

 in was built the nest. 



