the brick-yard. Torrey and Faxon heard the same
three birds Monday night. 
  As the twilight deepened two Wood Ducks skimmed
[margin] Wood Ducks
past us and dropped into Pout Pond. I got the
glass on one of them and saw that it was a fine
drake. The other also looked like a drake but I did 
not get a really good sight at him. Ten minutes 
later two, which may have been the same, came
from the eastward and also dropped into the pond. 
A single Night Heron came in. Before sunset a Sparrow 
Hawk skimmed low over the swamp. The cat-tails
were alive with Rails as usual and when one
called the sound would be taken up by half a 
dozen others in quick succession. 
  I started for home at 7.30 walking down 
to Alewife Brook where George met me with the 
buggy.  On the way heard two birds calling cutta,
one in the bog north of the Pine Swamp brick yard, the
other in the bushy swamp between the brick [?] houses on
Fresh Pond and the turnpike. As I was passing
the swimming place on Glacialis several Night Herons 
began uttering their hoarse quaks in the Maple Swamp
and one circled out over me. 
  Night Herons, Wood Ducks, Gallinules, Sparrow Hawk,
Virginia and Carolina Rails! What a list of birds to 
see in one short hour in swamps intersected 
with railroads, dotted with brick yards,
slaughter houses etc. and within less than a mile of
the centre of a city of sixty thousand inhabitants. 
It is no less strange that these birds are all
- except, perhaps the Herons, quite as numerous in the 
swamps as they were twenty years ago.