Jan., 1920 21 
A RETURN TO THE DAKOTA LAKE REGION 
By FLORENCE MERRIAM BAILEY 
(Continued from volume X XI, page 230) 
PASSING WINGS 
AGER TO SEE the lakes where the Ducks of East Sweetwater went at 
> night, and to find where the Gulls that came over to Sweetwater at night 
spent their days, I made a circle of six or seven miles out over the harvest 
fields, discovering four blue lakes among the dumps of glacial drift. Three 
were rather small, but one was long and attractively irregular in outline, and all 
were open bordered so that it was possible to see approaching hunters from a dis- 
tance. The nearest lake, from whose direction many of our Ducks came, was a 
small round basin sheltered from the wind by low glacial hills and had strips 
of beach that glowed pink with a low branching plant suggesting coral. A flock 
of about thirty Canvas-backs and a few other Ducks were already here at half 
past four, but at sight of my figure on the bank above nervously rose and swung 
back toward Sweetwater. 
Another of the small lakes, besides the Ducks scattered over its surface, had 
a flock of seventy or eighty Franklin Gulls sitting picturesquely in the middle 
of its blue water. Sloping up from this lake to the wheat fields was a rough strip 
of weeds and bushes from which I flushed some young Prairie Chickens, two of 
which burst away like bombs from almost under my feet. The largest of the foar 
lakes, on which was a goodly number of Ducks, had a long point projecting out 
into the water which was outlined with Franklin Gulls, probably gathered in 
ready to fly across to Sweetwater. The harvesters had reported seeing Gulls 
‘‘eatching crickets’’, and when starting on my round I had discovered a flock 
hunting over the bundles of wheat. One would fly low over the shocks till. ap- 
parently, a cricket or a grasshopper caught its eye, when it would suddenly 
pounce down upon it. A droll sight it certainly was, to see a Gull, a bird asso- 
ciated with the ocean, in the middle of a harvest field sitting on a shock of wheat 
catching insects! 
On the way home after my tour of the lakes, following for greater ease the 
hard tracks of the reaper and binder, I crossed prairie billows dotted with shocks 
of wheat; billow after billow rounding up as far as the eye could see, under the 
blue sky; until, all landmarks lost, I looked to the sun, pointing the com- 
pass in the west. Another type of prairie landscape, another prairie microcosm, 
these rolling billows with their straw colored sheaves of wheat added to those 
of the level-topped miles of grain, the cloud-encircling sloughs, and the golden 
mustard islands. 
My tour of the lakes gave me a new understanding of the movements of the 
masses of waterfowl to and from East Sweetwater. While many flocks of Ducks 
usually crossed from our lake to the open eastern lakes during the latter part of 
the afternoon, about the middle of August, on several days that I watched them, 
the flocks from the west end of our lake gathered along the tules bordering the 
east bank before flying over. On August 17, at 6:30, there was a wide band of 
Ducks so closely brown-spotted that from my distance it was impossible to count 
individuals. Hundreds were there. Many preliminary adjustments were made, 
