May, 1918 A RETURN TO THE DAKOTA LAKE REGION 111 



beside a grassy slough. Here, as we went and came, an old hen was flushed 

 by our dog, and she ran around so distractedly that she must have had young in 

 hiding. 



Another worried parent — a blue Marsh Hawk — flew toward me, almost up 

 to me, when I was exploring the strip of prairie, uttering the familiar keck-eck 

 that reminded me of my Stump Lake experience four years previous. When 

 satisfied, he retreated, and flew down to the ground by a small slough where 

 he was probably watching for meadow mice. Four days later the brown mother 

 Marsh Hawk rose noisily from a patch of knee-high snowberry, where I was 

 much pleased to find a nest with three eggs and two decidedly brownish downy 

 young, whose heads wabbled about weakly over their brother eggs. One of 

 them made a very faint noise and opened its black bill once or twice, looking 

 up as its parent passed over. Both parents flew above my head while I was 

 looking at the young, but as I had met with much worse treatment at the hands 

 of their relatives, I did not pay much attention to them, and they soon de- 

 sisted. 



One of the Hawks, to my surprise, was chased by a Black Tern, a bird 

 which is usually so preoccupied with its own affairs that peace reigns in its 

 neighborhood. I wondered if he were the one I saw beating over the open 

 slough close by when suddenly chased after by a Kingbird, chased so closely 

 and persistently and rancorously that if he were not pecked on the back, a deep 

 dent was made in his gray matter, for he fled precipitately through the sky, 

 going out into its grayness. Perhaps this had given the mild mannered Tern a 

 new idea which he was applying to the Marsh Hawk ! 



Ever since my experience with Circus four years previous, when the old 

 birds refused to believe in my interest in their young and treated me with un- 

 remitting suspicion and hostility, I had been regretting that I had not had a 

 blind from which to study them. Now I had a borrowed blind, and here was 

 a nest to watch only three miles from home. Remembering the long interval 

 during which the young had stayed in or about the Stump Lake nest — four or 

 five weeks — I did not hurry back. Nine days later, armed with camp stool, 

 camera, and blind, eager for an intimate study of birds whom my faulty meth- 

 ods had antagonized before, I made my way cautiously back to the nest. It 

 was empty ! I was greatly taken aback. All my well laid plans had gone agley ! 

 Marsh Hawks, of all birds, robbed of their young ! Perhaps their too easy ac- 

 ceptance of my presence was the clue. But what enemies were abroad to take 

 advantage of them ? Could it have been one of the numerous marauding wood 

 pussies ? 



I examined the nest ruefully — it was all there was left for me to do, for 

 not even a parent was to be seen in the neighborhood. The nest, which was 

 rather small, was well placed on a dry knoll above the slough in the middle of 

 a snowberry patch. A passageway about a yard in length led to it from the 

 edge of the bushes carpeted with grass like that which lined the nest. 

 Possibly in carrying in lining material the builders had dropped parts of their 

 loads and had gradually tramped a good path. Near the outer entrance, the 

 passageway was about ten inches wide, but it narrowed to a concealed gateway 

 by the nest. In the bushes about two feet from the nest was a large bare spot 

 on which the old Hawks may have lit when feeding the young. 



From the edge of a slough on which the Marsh Hawk had been seen standing 

 — one of the deceptive grassy sloughs that you start to walk across and suddenly 



