Away to the far horizon stretches endlessly the green-brown prairie, or the sea of reeds and rushes of the marsh, desolate, forlorn, monotonous. 
Yet in its distances the wildfowl breeding ground is majestic; in its silences, pierced now and again with bird cries, awesome and serene 
Through Wildfowl Breeding Grounds 
THE WASTE SPACES OF THE NORTHWEST WHERE WILD BIRDS FIND A HOME TO REAR THEIR YOUNG- 
MATING TIME IN THE MARSHES AND MUSKEGS—A PLEA FOR THE PROTECTION OF NATURAL PRESERVES 
Herbert K. Job 
State Ornithologist of Connecticut 
Photographs by the Author 
W HERE go the wildfowl to breed, those wedges of honking 
geese, high overhead; those lines and masses of swiftly- 
moving ducks that skirt our shores or drop into our streams and 
lakes on their swift journey northward in the early spring? 
As a class, our 
American w i 1 d- 
fowl are loyal to 
the call of the 
North. A f e w 
kinds, notably the 
wood duck ancl 
much the North as the Northwest. Though a few species, par¬ 
ticularly scoters, eiders, and the oldsquaw, follow the North-At- 
lantic coast line to their distant breeding grounds, the majority 
of them strike across the land somewhere and hie them to the 
marshes, pools 
and muskegs of 
the Northwest in¬ 
terior, even many 
species that in 
winter are dis¬ 
tinctly maritime. 
<On an island lake in Saskatchewan the fluffy nest of a 
wild Canada goose in dry stony land in the grass 
black duck, breed South as well as North, 
and a few others occasionally. But the ma¬ 
jority find annual attraction in the northern 
wilds. Creatures of habit, they are impelled 
by the ways of past generations to seek out 
again the place of their birth. 
There is a strange thing about this habit: 
Tthe rendezvous of tbe wildfowl is not as 
Soft reeds picked out with down—the nest of the 
toothsome mallard duck by the prairie slough 
The nest of a lesser scaup duck fashioned about like 
an ark of bulrushes and hidden by tall reeds 
There we find them in May, swimming by 
pairs in the sloughs, in beautiful nuptial 
'plumage, or settled down for the summer 
to breed. 
The southern edge of this region is the 
prairie country of Minnesota and North 
Dakota. To the north it includes Manitoba, 
Saskatchewan and Alberta, and thence 
88 
