On the Domestication of Some of our Wild Ducks. 



By Charles Linden. 



At an altitude of 1,291 feet above the sea level, and about fifty 

 miles from Buffalo, as the birds fly, lies Lake Chautauqua, the lar- 

 gest of the inland waters of Western New York. It is a beautiful 

 sheet of clear, dark-green water, of about eighteen miles in length, 

 which, even in mid-summer, hardly ever has a temperature above 

 62 F., on account of its high elevation, and has, therefore, become 

 a favorite summer resort for hundreds of people, who flock there to 

 recruit health and strength. The basin of Lake Chautauqua is a 

 deep trough excavated out of the rocks of the Chemung group, 

 and well filled by the drainage of two low ranges of hills run- 

 ning at a short distance parallel to its shores. When these were 

 covered with deep forests the rainfall was naturally more abun- 

 dant and the level of the lake could then hardly have suffered 

 any lowering, as its evaporation on account of its high altitude, 

 is even now not excessive. But with the disappearance of the 

 wilderness and the gradual deepening of its only outlet, the Con- 

 ewango creek, changes have been wrought within our recent pe- 

 riods, which are inferred from the lacrustine deposits near the 

 shores of the lake, and attest that its level was once twenty or thirty 

 feet higher. 



We are informed by old settlers, that twenty-five years ago deep 

 forests of beech, poplar and chestnut covered every foot of that 

 part of Chautauqua county, where there are now only scattered 

 patches of second growth timber, more or less separated by inter- 

 vening clearances. Their disappearance has in turn naturally pro- 

 duced many changes in the avifauna of the lake, and many species 

 of birds, which used to breed there have now deserted their ancient 

 haunts for less disturbed retreats. 



It is by kindness of one of these old residents, Mr. Geo. Irwin, 

 an accurate observer of nature, living near Mayville, that I have ob- 



BUL. BUF. SOC. NAT. SCI. (5) JAN., 1882. 



