The Water-fowl of the Pacific Coast 5 1 1 



make your detour, sneak carefully up the bank 

 and raise your head, you see little but blank water, 

 while a roar of wings a hundred yards or so on 

 one side makes you wonder who it was that said 

 the duck was not a game-bird. 



All water-fowl are crazy over freshly irrigated 

 land, and for the first twenty-four hours after 

 the water is turned in they can hardly be driven 

 away from some fields. In the great valley, San 

 Joaquin, there are tens of thousands of acres of 

 alfalfa and grain irrigated in winter, and outside 

 of the club grounds these now afford the best 

 shooting in the southern half of California. The 

 best used to be on the great tule marshes of the 

 Sacramento and the San Joaquin rivers and about 

 their entrances into San Francisco Bay. Plenty 

 of shooting and vast areas of good ground yet re- 

 main open there, though the best places are now 

 owned by clubs. But even on irrigated ground 

 the duck is still wary. It appears quite accidental, 

 yet there is a marvellous method in the way he 

 selects open fields with no brush or banks behind 

 which you can sneak on him. So that for the 

 best shooting it will generally pay to make a pit 

 on the line of flight. In all such cases the water- 

 fowl generally have some big lake or pond where 

 they spend much of the time flying from that to 

 the feeding-ground, such as Buena Vista Lake at 

 the head of the San Joaquin Valley, from which 



