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THE GREA.T RED-BREASTED RAIL, OR FRESH- 

 WATER MARSH-HEN. 



Ball us elegans. 



PLATE CCIII. Male and Young. 



No doubt exists in ray mind that Wilson considered this beautiful 

 bird as merely the adult of Rallus crepitans, the manners of which he de- 

 scribed, as studied at Great Egg Harbour in New Jersey, while he gave 

 in his works the figure and colouring of the present species. My friend 

 Thomas Nuttall has done the same, without, I apprehend, having seen 

 the two birds together. Always unwilling to find faults in so ardent a stu- 

 dent of nature as Wilson, I felt almost mortified when, after having, in 

 the company of my worthy and learned friend, the Reverend John Bach- 

 man, carefully examined the habits of both species, which, in form and 

 general appearance, are closely allied, I discovered the error which he had 

 in this instance committed. Independently of the great difference as to 

 size between the two species, there are circumstances connected with their 

 habits which mark them as distinct. The Rallus elegans is altogether a 

 fresh-water bird, while the R. crepitans never removes from the salt-water 

 marshes, that are met Avith along our eastern Atlantic coasts, from the 

 Jerseys to the Gulf of Mexico. Nay, the present species is found at con- 

 siderable distances inland, where it breeds and spends the whole year ; 

 whereas the latter never goes farther from its maritime haunts than the 

 borders of the salt-marshes, and this merely on certain occasions, when 

 driven thither by the high risings of tides. The Fresh-water Marsh-hen, 

 besides, is confined to the Southern States, a few stragglers only having 

 been observed farther eastward than the State of Pennsylvania, and these 

 only in fresh-water meadows. 



So long ago as the year 1810, on the 29th May, I caught one of these 

 birds, a female, at Henderson, in the State of Kentucky, when I made 

 the following memorandum respecting it : — " It is an excessively shy bird, 

 runs with great celerity, and when cauglit, cries like a common fowL" 

 It weighed eleven ounces avoirdupois ; its total length was 20| inches, 

 and its alar extent 22. 



This species constantly resides in the fresh-water marshes and ponds 



