feather of the speculum, a blended patch of copper red, sometimes combined 

 with greenish bronze and purple. All these feathers are iridescent, but their 

 changeableness is mainly from dusky to bright, rather than from one bright 

 tint to another. They render beautifully a portion of the surface of the dim 

 translucent water where there is a somewhat vague reflection of the sky or of 

 plants above. Forward, this patch is blended softly into the ashen olive of 

 the wing-coverts; while the speculum is bordered outwardly with a band of 

 white — like a sharp streak of the clearest sky-reflection on the elsewhere dim, 

 semi-transparent water. So, in lesser degree, with the grayish-white longi- 

 tudinal stripe formed by the outer veins of the folded primaries, above sharply 

 bordered with dark blue (the outer veins and a narrow stripe next the shaft 

 on the inner veins of the primaries), and forward blended smoothly into the 

 ashen-olive patch at the bases of the primaries. This combination of softly 

 blended with clean-cut, sharp-edged markings is what gives the water-picturing 

 its peculiar magic, for it represents the two main characteristic elements in 

 the aspect of quiet water, namely, vistas through the surface into the liquid 

 depths, and reflections, on the surface, of things above. As in the duck's 

 costume, so in the water which it pictures, these two elements are now sharply 

 differentiated, and now intimately blended. 



Most potent of all, perhaps, are the pictures of reflection on the Wood 

 Duck's richly crested, green and purple head, with its clean-cut stripes and 

 bars of snowy white. These white marks picture bright and sharp reflections 

 of the sky (their sharpness of outline caused perhaps by straggling wavelets 

 which 'cut' and border them) lying on the dark, translucent water, tinted 

 by vague reflections from the shore. Or, again, the white and dark marks, all 

 together, suggest a definite, fixed reflection-picture of a fringe of bushes along 

 the shore, with the bright sky beyond cutting in among their crowns, and show- 

 ing here and there between them, lower down. The white on the head and 

 neck and cheeks shows duly bright, while that on the throat, from which the 

 higher spots are offshoots, is, in the bird's normal life-postures, dull with 

 shadow, and belongs mainly to the obliterative shading. In the resultant 



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