176 THE CONDOR Vol. XX 



downward strokes. On they went till they passed out of sight down the lake 

 through the channel between the long slender spits at the mouth of Creel 

 Bay — beautiful spits that, when the sun struck them looked like slenderly pen- 

 cilled points of gold. 



When the ducks and grebes were close along shore, I often went up on the 

 tin roof to see them better. While there, at different times, a family of Chim- 

 ney Swifts burst out of the chimne}^ and flew around chattering, the roll and 

 wick-up of a Flicker came from the third story roof above and two young were 

 seen chasseing and then standing on the ridgepole, their spotted breasts show- 

 ing against the blue sky ; young Baltimore Orioles were heard teasing for food, 

 an Arkansas Kingbird, known as the "yellow breast", passed, and the white- 

 breasted flew by carrying straw; a Wood Pewee returned to its dead branch 

 with a shake of the wings, a young cowbird on the ground opened its bill en- 

 treatingly to a sparrow; a White-breasted Nuthatch and a Clay-colored Sparrow 

 called; Song Sparrows, Maryland Yellow-throats, and Warbling Vireos sang; a 

 Goldfinch rollicked by, and a Mourning Dove sped past ; while two cuckoos ans- 

 wered each other from the woods either side the house, and a Yellow Warbler 

 flashed yellow over the green lawn. 



From the crest of our bluff there was a wide view, not only of the blue 

 and white water of Creel Bay, with its widely curved, wooded coves and its 

 long jutting points ; but out beyond the points, south across the main lake to 

 the softly purpled sides of Sully Hill, an old terminal moraine left by the re- 

 treating glaciers. Here, appropriately enough, another relic of the past, the 

 buffalo which had roamed the lake shores and all the wide surrounding prairie, 

 killed off in wantonness, was now with elaborate care to be reinstated in a 

 National Park. So too, the Indians, belittled contemporaries of the buffalo, 

 after outliving them and collecting their bones from the prairie, were now, with 

 elaborate care gathered for education at the Industrial School at Fort Totten, 

 a1 the foot of Sully Hill. 



Reminders of the early hunting days of the Sioux and Chippewa were 

 seen at the farmhouse, where there was a pile of stone hammers and hatchets 

 mostly plowed up on the farm. In one of eight large Indian mounds on the 

 place — excavated by the National Museum — I was told that a Burrowing Owl, 

 here at the extreme eastern limit of its range, had nested in an old badger hole. 

 Another bird at its eastern limit, the Magpie, had also been recorded here, two 

 individuals having spent a winter in the barnyard of a neighbor. One of the 

 historic relics of the region was to be seen on the opposite shore of Creel Bay, 

 the skeleton of an old passenger and freight boat used on the lake by one of the 

 earliest settlers when the water reached the site of the present town of Devil's 

 Lake. 



Boats were frequently seen going and coming from the Chautauqua dock 

 across the lake, row boats, motor boats and sail boats ; and once a short race 

 was seen between two of the pretty white-winged sail boats. When the motor 

 boats, their sides sometimes glistening like the side of a grebe, made their eve- 

 ning trips up the lake, the grebes watched with heads up, heralding their ap- 

 proach with far-reaching alarm calls, and diving and swimming over to our 

 cove out of the way. Sometimes when the boat had retreated the birds would 

 call and swim out again, but boats of any kind filled them with terror ; and 

 perhaps that was one reason why they felt safe at night on our undisturbed 

 side of the lake. Near sunset one evening, the light rested on the wooded east- 



