Taken in Fresno County 



MR. WILSON AT CLOSE RANGE 



The Wilson Phalarope 



family affairs. The sug- 

 gestion is worthy of con- 

 sideration, for it may 

 well be that a society 

 which has evolved fe- 

 males in pants has also 

 produced a goodly num- 

 ber of bachelor-maids 

 and complacent aunties, 

 not to mention fortunate 

 males who have man- 

 aged to escape the wiles 

 and blandishments of 

 the ardent sex. 



That the male who 

 has once taken the veil 

 does not shirk thence- 

 forth the arduous duties 



of paternity, we have most emphatic proof. The male bird not only incu- 

 bates the eggs, but has sole care of the chicks when hatched. While in 

 camp at Goose Lake, in 1912, I found that young Phalaropes were moving 

 about and hiding in the grass by the 25th of June. The male birds danced 

 close attendance upon our movements and showed every extravagance of 

 solicitude; but the females merely looked in occasionally, once in ten 

 minutes or such a matter, to see that their worser halves were giving 

 proper attention to their duties in the nursery, and then returned, con- 

 tent, to the distant club-room. One distraught father I nearly seized in 

 his abandon of grief. Again and again he cast himself down in the grass 

 and put on agonies both of distress and invitation, with tones varied to 

 suit. His chief pose was to stand with head and breast depressed to the 

 ground and with tail elevated so as to show the white underparts con- 

 spicuously. At other times he would rise clear of the grass a-wing and fall 

 back again and again as though quite exhausted. Withal he was such a pale, 

 pathetic, and manifestly overworked household drudge that one felt quite 

 ashamed to add to his burdens. The situation wrought upon the nerves. 

 Here at the best was Topsy-Turvy Town; and a mere man, alone, and 

 unattended, had fearful forebodings of what might befall him — in Cali- 

 fornia. 



During the fall migration Wilson Phalaropes appear in considerable 

 numbers about our southern ponds and brackish shallows. While they, 

 too, resort to the surface of the water, they are rather more given to wad- 

 ing or running about on shore, in company with Sandpipers. But one who 



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Photo by the Author 



