486 



RECREATION 



A PAIR OF SOOTY TERN IN FLIGHT 



coming that we promptly turned the tele- 

 scope from the mile-distant open water at the 

 north to the southern skyline. It was six in 

 the morning when we first saw the gleam of 

 the water amid the ice; two hours later 

 hurrying black dots could be seen coming 

 over the pine trees that fringed the lake hills 

 — faintly pencilled gray lines on the clouds 

 that soon resolved under the powerful glass 

 into whistle-wings, American golden-eyes. 

 These swooped to the wind and settled into 

 the crack, and were soon followed by a pair 

 of red-breasted mergansers. All morning 

 long the procession kept arriving, goose- 

 anders, redheads, bluebills, surf-ducks, mal- 

 lards, teal and pintails, widgeons and wood- 

 ducks, dusky mallards and canvasbacks, 

 ruddy and bufflehead, coween and] little 

 sawbills — the hooded mergansers. That night 



a motley flock of twenty-two va- 

 rieties of ducks slept in the now 

 much-enlarged opening in the ice ; 

 we had never seen such a general 

 arrival the first day. And most 

 of the birds were mated, this hav- 

 ing been caused by some of the 

 lakes in New York State and 

 Ohio opening up earlier than us- 

 ual, giving the great migration 

 a place to rest and sort its varied 

 ranks and mate its sexes. As 

 they were following the isotherm 

 of 35 F., we had plenty of time 

 to study and picture the birds, 

 for the wilds to the north of us, 

 where they breed, the great clay 

 belt, the muskegs of the Albany, 

 the short sunlight on the James 

 Bay coast, would not experience 

 this temperature for weeks. 



While we watched from the 

 Beaver in midlake the awful con- 

 test between the wind, the sun 

 and the swollen current, and the 

 great fields of lake ice, a contest 

 in which shores were shaved, 

 trees uprooted and great bould- 

 ers tossed from their places like 

 marbles before the advancing ice- 

 shove, we noted the later migra- 

 tion of the wildfowl that make 

 these lakes their homes. Except- 

 ing the black-duck and the mal- 

 lard, the teal, the wood-duck and 

 the hooded merganser, all the^ducks con- 

 tinue north on the migration. 



We were treated one day to the sight of a 

 falling blue heron, locally the crane — the 

 shu-shuge of the redmen. Sailing over- 

 head at a great height, this bird suddenly 

 decided it had arrived, and let go — down it 

 came, a tumbling, twisting, swift-revolving 

 mass of head, long neck and still longer 

 legs, the noise it made sounding like a swift 

 gust in the quiet air. Whirling at fearful 

 speed it fell, then the great wings shot out, 

 the bird steadied itself and sailed calmly on 

 as if a half-mile tumble were an everyday 

 event. Loons were arriving; cormorants 

 joined the host ; a solitary pelican was seen. 

 Two kinds of wild geese — Canada and the 

 brant — flew over. Spotted sandpipers, kill- 

 deer plover, golden plover, bittern and least 



