In the Spartina with the Swallows 



BY O. WIDMANN 



APLE LAKE, in St. Charles county. Mo., is one of a 

 series of lakes situated between the bluffs and the 

 Mississippi River. The bhiffs are four to five miles 

 from the river bank, thus leaving a wide stretch of 

 alkivial land, lowest toward the bhiffs, forming an ex- 

 tended, nearly level marsh, mostly too wet and poor 

 for cultivation, and covered with square miles of cord- 

 grass {Sparfina n/zos/zro/t/cs). In dry summers or on 

 higher levels it reaches only a height of three or four feet, but in 

 wet summers, as for instance in i8g8, it attains the stately height of 

 si.\ to eight feet, with such a dense growth of rigid leaves that it is 

 hard work to walk or even drive through. As a commercial article 

 it is worth very little, though it will make good paper. When young 

 it is liked by horses and cattle, and when two feet high it makes 

 pretty good hay, which is sometimes baled and sold as prairie hay. 

 But while man does not yet know how to make good use of it, 

 birds do, especially some species of the families Hirundinida^ and 

 Icterida? — the Swallow and Blackbird families — who find in the spar- 

 tina the material for a good and safe dormitory. Hundreds of acres 

 of this grass cover the region about Maple Lake, and as they are 

 within the confines of one of the best managed club grounds, where 

 neither plow nor cattle, neither drainage nor fire are allowed, they 

 serve many kinds of birds for a roosting place at all seasons of the 

 year, but especially in fall migration. 



Of Swallows, the most numerous frequenters are the Eaves, the 

 Tree or Whitebreasts, and the Roughwings, and they show their 

 appreciation of this rare place of security and peace by coming 

 early in the season and staying late. When the Eaves have become 

 strangers at their breeding stations for a . long time, the marsh is 

 the place to find them in plenty. Here is the place to look for 

 the first Whitebreast of the year as early as the second week of 

 March, and for the last, in the third week of October. For two 

 months, from the middle of August to the middle of October, 

 a cloud of Swallows may be seen every evening, just before 

 dark, hovering over the most remote and inaccessible part of 

 the immense spartina waste, and wherever you are in the marsh 

 in the late afternoon, you cannot fail to notice innumerable Swal- 

 lows skimming the grassy ocean and the adjacent lakes. If toward 

 sunset \ou watch them closely, you will find that, though they 

 may linger long on some favorite hunting ground, the general 



(115) 



