82 Union Bay 



sions which will tell us much about the marsh and the 

 crewmen who train so valiantly in its vicinity. 



I moved along with the feeling that the crews were in no 

 way responsible for the conditions which I was now con- 

 vinced were greatly altered. But the change in location of 

 the crewhouse, apparently without significance either for 

 good or bad, was proving to be the most disturbing factor 

 in years. I passed the place where the canoehouse manager 

 had first seen whistling swans in this city area. I had watched 

 them pull food from a bottom just within reach of their long 

 necks. I had seen them in the same place in several succeed- 

 ing years but I knew that I would not see them there again. 

 The water was now several feet deep and the vegetation had 

 been removed by the dredge. I remembered the answer I 

 had received from the greatest of wildlife management men, 

 when I had written him as to the advisability and desirability 

 of preserving areas like the marsh. He had replied that it 

 was not easy to make an unbiased reply to my letter because 

 the institution with which he was connected had just spent 

 nearly a hundred thousand dollars to reproduce artificially 

 the conditions which our district was so anxious to eliminate. 



I did not think of this as a bit of propaganda nor did I 

 think that the nesting site of a few wild fowl was of more 

 importance than the erection of a third-of-a-million dollar 

 building to house one of the finest of all collegiate sports. 

 But since this story deals with the impact of man on wildlife 

 it is essential to point out the unsuspected effects of man's 

 handling of areas like the marsh. 



I approached the point where a tule wren, the most indus- 

 trious of all marsh architects, had built seven nests in the 

 early stages of one nesting season. A tule wren had annually 

 nested on this point. If it was ever used again for nesting 

 purposes it would be by a pied-billed grebe or a coot, for the 

 smooth water of the marsh now covered it. Two nesting sites 



