BOARD OF GAME AND FISH COMMISSIONERS 
67 
north for its summer home. The Whistler has been enabled to survive while 
the Trumpeter, possibly from the fact that its nesting places have been much over¬ 
run by the advancing habitations of man, has steadily diminished in numbers until 
it is now nearly, if not quite, extinct everywhere. The primitive hunting instinct of 
man, still rampant even in modern times, has led him too often to want to kill and 
possess such a big and wonderful thing as a swan. As Forbush says in his Game 
Birds, Wild-foiul and Shore Birds “There is little safety for a Swan in America 
unless it is high in the air or has a mile of open water around it . When the 
shotgun will not carry far enough the long-range rifle is brought to play. If the 
Swan alights on a game preserve in the north it is shot because it is rare, and 
is wanted for a ‘specimen’; if it alights in New England, and is seen, it rarely 
gets away.” If the surviving species of this largest, most graceful and most at¬ 
tractive of all North American water-fowl is to exist long, the general public 
must be educated to regard the killing of one of these birds as a disgraceful act 
and punishment must be meted out to the full extent of the law. 
Swans are surface feeders and for the purpose of procuring food frequent 
shallow waters, where, like the other surface feeding water-fowl, they can search 
the bottom for the various aquatic plants upon which they chiefly live. By means 
of their very long necks and the tipping up of their bodies they can easily feed, 
it is said, in water three feet deep. 
IBISES ( Ihididae ). 
Ibises are natives of southern climes and do not belong properly to the bird 
fauna of a northern state like Minnesota. However, a number of individuals of 
the White-faced Glossy Ibis have been seen in the state and six or eight of them 
shot and preserved. They have been mostly immature birds in the early fall and 
may have reached these parts by reason of a curious impulse implanted in the 
young of their tribe which impels them to wander northward varying distances 
before going southward to their winter quarters. The most northern locality at 
which they have been taken is Lake Miltona, Douglas County. 
Strange to relate this far-southern bird has been known to nest at Heron 
Lake, Jackson County. In 1894 and again in 1895 Rev. P. B. Peabody found 
several pairs living with the Night Herons and discovered their nests and eggs. 
One male in full breeding plumage was shot and is now in the Museum of the 
Zoological Survey, University of Minnesota. Repeated search has failed to show 
the presence of any of these birds at the lake since. Two young Ibises of this 
species were shot at Heron Lake in November, 1893, and were mounted and pre¬ 
sented to the Survey Museum by Mr. L. F. Lammers of Heron Lake. 
Ibises on account of their long, downwardly curved bills are not uncommonly, 
though incorrectly, called “curlews.” 
BITTERNS, HERONS AND EGRETS. ( Ardeidae ). 
There are five species belonging to this family which are of regular occurrence 
in this state, viz., the American Bittern, the I.east Bittern, the Great Blue Heron, 
the Green Heron and the Black-crowned Night Heron. The Egret (//erodias 
egretta ) has been reported from Lanesboro, Fillmore County, by Dr. J. H. Hvoslef 
(“occasional; one stayed July 21-23, 1884”) and both this species and the Snowy 
