Most careful measurements have, of course, been made of the eggs of the 

 Yellow Rail; but so uniform have been the dimensions discovered, that the 

 given resultant is based upon twenty-six eggs only. Thus, we have followed 

 extremes: .77 - .87 by 1.03 - 1.18 inches (for normal eggs). The entire length 

 variation is .15; that for widths only .10 (In the P. B. P. set of ten, the width 

 variation was only .02 — a remarkable uniformity). 



I cannot refrain from quoting here the fantastic and ridiculous note of 

 Hutchins regarding the occurrence and habits of the Yellow Rail near Hudson 

 Bay (under date of 1777), as given by Macoun's Catalogue of Canadian Birds, 

 (p. 153) : "This elegant bird is an inhabitant of the marshes on the coast of Hud- 

 son Bay, near the eflux of the Severn River, about 150 miles south of York Fac- 

 tory, from the middle of May to the end of September. It never flies above 

 sixty yards at a time, but runs with great rapidity among the long grass near the 

 shores. In the morning and the evening it utters a note which resembles the 

 striking of a flint and steel; at other times it makes a shrieking noise. It builds 

 no nest, but lays from ten to sixteen perfectly white eggs among the grass." Thus 



> ' ■ 





, x* 



YELLOW RAIL IN CAPTIVITY. Photo by Norman A. Wood 



did the earlier ornithologists leap at times from fact to fancy, when facts were 

 wanting. And the ghosts of Hutchinses are audaciously roaming this fatuous 

 earth today, in the pages of faddist magazines! Savants will surely pardon here 

 a word of amateurish comment: From a fairly intensive study of the nesting of 

 the Yellow Rail, I am forced to conclude that, in the case of the Yellow Rail, the 

 same individual females lay eggs more or less varied as to tint and markings from 

 year to year. And herein lies one of the stubbornly insoluble elemental problems 

 which confront the inquirer in the domain of comparative oology. The only 

 study dealing with these problems, so far as known to the writer of this sketch, 

 is an intensive and most suggestive paper by H. Mousley, entitled, "Subsequent 

 Nestings" (The Auk, XXXIV. 381, sqq., with graphic illustrations). 



Pages and pages of this sketch have been voluntarily and ruthlessly 

 slashed in the interests of space. Yet the writer must claim room for vaunting 

 the still unexpressed thrills which have punctuated the Yellow Rail quests, and 

 which have, for over twenty years, availed to keep him young. He desires, too, 

 to express profound gratitude to those bird-lovers whose generosity has made 

 these far journeyings possible. Not least, by any means, is my gratitude to 



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