178 Union Bay 



practice flights. Sounds, odors, and activities emphasized the 

 presence of human life. 



There I was, on that August day, alone in my canoe, just 

 outside all this clatter of planes, boats, automobiles, and 

 songsters, waiting for a new pied-billed grebe to emerge 

 from a small egg in a soiled and disheveled nest composed 

 of soaked and partly decayed vegetation. Nothing disturbed 

 me where I sat. The activity was at my back. I faced the 

 quiet nest and its five eggs, and behind that the smooth water 

 of the marsh inlets, the lazy movement of the cattails, and 

 the yellow of blooming beggar's ticks. The human life passed 

 me closely, but when I turned I watched it in the same way 

 that I would have peered in at the action from outside the 

 glass walls of the sound room in a movie studio. 



I began to read an old copy of George Borrow's Wild 

 Wales which I had brought along with me. I was soon with 

 him on his walking tour through the high country of Wales, 

 a trip which was somewhat interrupted by the constant pass- 

 ing of the anxious parents which continually uttered their 

 plaintive keck. Sometimes they came so close that sudden 

 fear conquered their anxiety; then they would stop and, with 

 no agitation of the water, sink out of sight. Sometimes, and 

 equally quietly, they would look over the situation by just 

 projecting their heads as a submarine might project its peri- 

 scope. Their vertical control was remarkable: specific gravity 

 apparently was changed by a slight compression of the 

 body so that, at will, they could sink just as a water-logged 

 piece of wood might sink, without external effort or move- 

 ment. Then they would go silently into the rushes and re- 

 main out of sight for half an hour or more. I am no dis- 

 turber of nests and would have left this one had I thought 

 my presence might have caused them to desert it, but I knew 

 that the brooding was so far along that nothing would in- 

 duce the grebes to quit. I was also sure that there was no 

 danger of the eggs chilling in the warm sun. 



