Vol. X~| 
1893 J 
Allen on the Nesting of the Black Duck. 
53 
THE NESTING OF THE BLACK DUCK ON PLUM 
ISLAND. 
BY CHARLES SLOVER ALLEN. 
(. Plates I and IT.') 
Although having an area of but a few hundred acres, Plum 
Island is so varied in its topograph}' and so rich in bird life that 
it proves a most interesting little world of its own. The nar¬ 
row eastern portion consists of high, rocky, upland pastures, 
without a tree or bush. In the miniature valleys each tiny pond 
has its pair of noisy Killdeers whose nearest neighbors are the 
Plovers on the hillside and the Nighthawks breeding on the 
rocky ledges. The whole north shore forms a long, irregular 
sand cliff of considerable height, thickly studded with huge 
glacial boulders; some stranded on the beach were thirty feet 
high, while others showed great rocky masses far out in the 
water. Prior to 1885 , when ‘Old Jerome’ still owned the 
island and his law of absolute protection was in full force, there 
were but few of these boulders that were not crowned with Fish 
Hawks’ nests, to which the Kingfishers paid their visits, like the 
minstrels of old to the castles of the Vikings. The Swallows 
had located their colonies in the lesser sand banks of the southern 
shore that gradually became a broad beach with low scattered 
sand hills to the westward where the island broadened out into 
a great rolling sandy plain. Terns were breeding in the drift and 
sedge close to the beach at South Point. As everywhere else 
upon this island, Fish Hawks were nesting here by the hundred, 
on the few isolated and dwarfed trees, and on the ground where- 
ever there was a little sand hill or by the side of each convenient 
stump, stake, or piece of stranded timber. Sandpipers, Meadow¬ 
larks, Sparrows and the like were fearlessly nesting within a few 
yards of them. Even in the densely populated strip of fairly 
heavy timber, some eight or ten acres in extent, the Fish Hawks 
were on the very best of terms with all their smaller neighbors, 
save only the Crows that represented the criminal element of this 
community, and a large rookery of Night Herons that persisted 
in occupying that swampy corner of the woods that merged into 
and were in part surrounded by the great fresh water marsh in the 
centre of the island. In this marsh it was that I finally found my 
