120 
BIRDS OF NEW MEXICO 
markings. The male Pintail utters “a loud qua , qua” in flight, and has 
also a mellow whistle, while the female has “a hoarse muffled quack 
and several low notes. ” 
When hunting ducks on the Rio Grande on October 20, 1918, Mr. 
Aldo Leopold saw a remarkable sight from his blind. A very severe 
hailstorm set in, and as he says, “During the thick of the storm I dis¬ 
covered that a flock of about forty Pintail ducks had settled in my 
decoys not twenty yards distant. Each bird was facing toward the 
storm, and each had his head and bill pointed almost vertically into the air. 
The flock presented a very strange appearance, and I was puzzled for 
a moment as to the meaning of their strange posture. Then it dawned 
on me what they were doing. In a normal position the hailstones 
would have hurt their sensitive bills, but pointed up vertically the bill 
presented a negligible surface from which hailstones would naturally be 
deflected. The correctness of this explanation was later proven by the 
fact that a normal position was resumed as soon as the hail changed into 
a slow rain” (1919a, p. 87). 
A female Pintail that Mr. Bent flushed from a slough in North 
Dakota dropped into the water near him and “began splashing about 
in a state of great excitement” although her young were not in sight. 
As he says, “during all the time, for an hour or more, that we were 
wading around the little slough, that Pintail watched us and followed us 
closely, flying about our heads and back and forth over the slough, 
frequently splashing down into the water near us in the most reckless 
manner, swimming about in small circles or splashing along the surface 
of the water, as if wounded, and often near enough for us to have hit 
her with a stick, quacking excitedly all the time. I never saw a finer 
exhibition of parental devotion than was shown by her total disregard 
of her own safety, which did not cease until we left the locality” (1902, 
p. 5). 
These notable ducks, which Mr. Job well characterizes as greyhounds 
among waterfowl for their speed and grace and elegance, easily become 
reconciled to the presence of man. A nest found by Mr. Rockwell was 
only eighteen feet from the rails of the main line of the Burlington 
Railroad over which a dozen or more heavy trains thundered every day, 
and well within the railroad right-of-way where section hands and 
pedestrians passed back and forth continually. So easily tamed are 
they that Mr. Job predicts that in time domesticated Pintails wall be as 
familiar as domesticated Mallards on preserves and private estates. 
Great flocks of them gather with other ducks at the celebrated municipal 
feeding grounds of Lake Merritt in Oakland, California, where an aver¬ 
age of $500 a year is spent for grain for them by the Oakland Park 
Board. At 10 a. m. and at 4 p. m., when a man appears with a bag of 
barley over his back, they fly out of the water and crowd up on the lawns 
