BY INLAND WATERS 103 



When they had gone we shivered, looking down 

 at the icy, empty water and thinking of its tempera- 

 ture. 



This bird, of course, is the sheldrake, sawbill, or 

 wheezer of our boyhood, one of those birds we used 

 to shoot at but never secured, for even when 

 wounded (we were always sure we had wounded one) 

 the merganser would dive and be lost to us. The 

 loss, however, was not great, for, like all wild-fowl 

 subsisting exclusively on fish and other live food, its 

 flesh is unedible, which no doubt accounts for its 

 continued existence in considerable numbers. It 

 migrates to its nesting-grounds farther north in 

 spring, returning late in October or November, when 

 the immature birds, lacking the dark greenish-black 

 head of the adult male, and with a lighter back, 

 seem to predominate. There are two other mer- 

 gansers, the red-breasted and the hooded, or swamp 

 sheldrake. The red-breasted merganser is hardly 

 seen by us except as a migrant, en route north or 

 south, but the hooded variety — a really striking 

 bird is the male duck, with his wonderful crest — is, 

 or at least was, common even into the summer on 

 swampy streams and shallow ponds, full of lily- 

 pads and pickerel. 



Much more than by the mergansers, however, 

 my boyhood memories of lily-padded ponds in the 

 woods are filled by the hell-divers, as we called 

 them — the pied-billed grebes. They arrived about 

 the 1st of April, and in those days used to remain to 

 breed, making their nests in the eel-grass and rushes, 

 especially the cattails. We used to push our leaky 

 old flat-bottomed boat in among the swampy shal- 



