64 | THE CONDOR Vol. XXIV 
ler was turned on but he did not fly through the spray as I have heard hummingbirds 
will do. 
That hummingbirds bathe, and quite thoroughly, then, is certain, despite the 
scarcity of references. No doubt they enjoy the bath as well as other birds, but the. 
ease with which they penetrate thickets and cover distances has enabled them to escape 
observation.—F RANK N. Bassperr, Alameda, California, January 21, 1922. 
Notes on Some Water-fowl.—Regarding the nesting of the Canvasback (Marila 
valisineria), | have on two occasions caught young ones, nearly full-grown, in New Mex- 
ico, where I believe they nest in considerable numbers in the mountain lakes. Half a 
dozen pairs used to breed every year on a prairie pond on the C. S. Ranch, the property 
of Mr. Charles Springer, near Cimarron, Colfax County, New Mexico. I found them 
there last in 1915. In California, the southward migration of Canvasbacks leaves the 
coast at about the latitude of San Luis Obispo, and from that point follows the moun- 
tain lakes south. Many of them winter in the lakes of the San Pedro Martir Moun- 
tains, Lower California, but one never sees them on either coast of the Peninsula. The 
records of a club like the Bolsa Chica show how rare the “Cans” are along the south- 
ern coast of California, and yet on the grounds of the San Timoteo Gun Club, near 
Banning, Riverside County, one used to bag two Cans for one of every other kind of 
bird! 
I once handled two fine specimens of the Black Brant (Branta nigricans) that 
were shot by a friend on a reservoir near Redlands in 1903. They were members of a 
flock of about a dozen, and I remember my surprise at seeing this strictly maritime 
species so far from the sea. I question whether the numbers of these birds have been 
so greatly diminished by shooting. They still winter in vast numbers on San Quentin 
Bay, Lower California, where the few gunners who have sought them have haa no dif- 
ficulty in making disgracefully huge bags. Perhaps the brant have learned to avoid our 
coast entirely, and pass by each year, in scarcely diminished numbers, to winter on the 
Mexican bays, where the report of a shotgun is seldom or never heard. 
I believe that changing conditions, brought about by the deplorable influx of 
settlers into California, lead one to think that the fowl have decreased more than is 
perhaps the case—though Heaven knows the decrease is pitiful encugh. In 1919, when 
I spent a few months at home, I found that dozens of ponds and lakes formerly alive 
with waterfowl, were deserted. Were the birds nearly all dead, or had they changed 
their wintering places? The geese are gone, like the cranes which, less than twenty 
years ago, used to pass in thousands over Riverside and San Bernardino counties, mi- 
grating northward from the Colorado delta. But concerning the ducks, I am not so 
sure. There are at present in California two great wintering regions for countless myri- 
ads of wild duck: the Sacramento Valley about Colusa, and the Imperial Valley in the 
south. . The number of fowl concentrated in these two regions is staggering to the 
imagination. Only two years ago I sat in a blind near Gridley and forgot to use my 
gun while I watched tens of thousands of sprig trailing like films of lace across the 
sky. I believe that in an hour not less than a quarter of a million birds passed south- 
ward. The rice plantations of this region account, in part at least, for the desertion of 
other parts of the valley; the great irrigated areas of Imperial, with the tule swamps 
where the New River runs into the Salton Sea, seem to me to account for much of the 
desertion of once populous waters in southern California. A generation ago ducks were 
almost unknown in the Imperial district. If Imperial were suddenly to go dry, and all 
the birds wintering there to scatter out, as formerly, over the lakes and marshes of 
southern California, the prospect might look less depressing. 
The fresh water marshes of Lake Chapala, in the state of Jalisco, Mexico, form 
another haven for waterfowl. At one end of the lake there is a great area of flooded 
land cut by a veritable labyrinth of sluggish channels, 400 square miles, I should say. 
The far interior of this swampy paradise, reached after three days’ travel in a native 
canoe, is a vast sanctuary for wildfowl, a region of gently-rolling damp prairies, set 
with small ponds, and traversed by a network of navigable channels leading to the great 
lake. I saw as many geese, White-fronted (Anser albifrons) and Snow (Chen hyperbo- 
reus), aS I have ever seen in the Sacramento Valley, and the number of ducks was past 
belief, with some interesting species, like the Masked and Florida Black or Dusky, to 
