THE OOLOGIST 



243 



The Hooded Merganser. 

 (Lopbodytes cacullatus) 



"Hello! Come over; here are your 

 birds eggs." 



March 15th, 1886 the writer with 

 Frank Lester and William T. Shaw, 

 were "camped" six miles below Lacon, 

 Illinois on the Illinois River, whither 

 we had gone to stay a couple of weeks 

 and shoot ducks, multitudes of which 

 swarmed along the river in those 

 days. We say "camped". In truth we 

 had a large cabin boat that was made 

 fast to some great trees along the riv- 

 er bank. The river was at flood and 

 extended across the overflowed bot- 

 toms to the West for a full mile and 

 to the East twice as far. 



This day, a typical March day, 

 clear, bright, cool and very windy. 

 The morning's shooting being done, I 

 pulled up my wooden decoys about 

 9:00 a. m. and started to row my hunt- 

 ing skiff to the cabin boat. The river 

 was extremely rough and here about 

 a thousand feet wide with an occa- 

 sional cake of floating ice going down 

 stream. The overflowed bottoms con- 

 sisted of a succession of open spaces 

 and densely timbered tracts contain- 

 ing trees and brush of all sizes from 

 huge elms, sycamores and cotton- 

 woods six or seven feet through and 

 a hundred feet high, down to that 

 pest to the duck hunter, "Buck Brush" 

 or Button Bush, more properly speak- 

 ing. Occasionally a long, narrow strip 

 of land would be seen sticking up 

 through the high water. Along the 

 river these strips of land or "hog 

 backs" as they are called, were quite 

 frequent immediately adjacent to the 

 stream proper. 



As I passed from the timber of the 

 bottoms I noticed a couple of fellows 

 chopping at an old dead snag on one 

 of these exposed pieces of land nearly 

 opposite our cabin boat, and on the 



east side of the river. Having noth- 

 ing better to do, I rowed up to where 

 they were, landed, strolled up to them 

 and inquired their purpose in cutting 

 the snag. "Coons" was the answer. 

 They turned out to be a couple of fur 

 hunters cutting the hollow trees for 

 coon and mink which were common 

 there in those days. 



To digress a moment I may say 1 

 have known mink in these bottoms to 

 be taken from the hollow limb of a 

 tree over sixty feet above the ground. 



I asked the older of the two — a 

 typical bronzed grizzly "river rat" — if 

 in their cutting they ever found any 

 eggs in the trees. "Sure" was the re- 

 ply. "The last tree we cut had three 

 of 'em in; they are right down there 

 now." Only a hundred yards or so 

 down the bank lay the tree he point- 

 ed to and 1 got there with exceeding 

 quickness. There were two old last 

 year's addled eggs of the Wood Duck 

 and one broken egg of the Hooded 

 Merganser, likewise a last season's 

 egg. Both had evidently been buried 

 in the saw dust like debris at the bot- 

 tom of the cavity of the now split 

 open limb of the fallen tree. I was 

 surprised and disappointed at the 

 same time. My only thought in ask- 

 ing the fur chasers about eggs was 

 the possibility of Owl's eggs and was 

 surprised to learn that Ducks' eggs 

 would last through the winter in these 

 hollow trees. 



I returned to the choppers and ar- 

 ranged that in case any more eggs 

 were found I was to be notified — for a 

 reward. They were then engaged in 

 cutting a huge soft maple snag, dead 

 and almost limbless, some three feet 

 or more through standing very close 

 to the river's bank which here was 

 quite steep. It was between the river 

 proper and a clearing of several acres 

 in extent on the "hog back" of land. 



