FOREST AND STREAM. 
449 
March 19, 1910.] 
alight among decoys. Now and then a cross 
flight gave easier shots and reconciled the gun¬ 
ners to many misses of head-on ducks. 
Shortly after sunrise the flight slackened and 
ceased. 
“I reckon it’s all over,” said one of the men, 
putting down his gun and preparing for a 
smoke. 
“Not all. We’ve time now to gather up the 
dead birds, and then we’ll get back into the 
blind and wait for the second edition. The 
ranchers will get out to their ditches at about 
half-past seven or eight, and they will stir up 
the ducks that have been eating their barley all 
night. There will be another flight of teal and 
sprigs before nine o’clock, and the birds will 
be coming in low to these pools. Here is 
where we get the limit.” 
It was even so, and at nine the two pulled 
their boat back to the camp landing, carrying 
loads of game and hearty appetites for coffee 
and flapjacks. 
The scene of this morning’s duck shooting 
was formerly known as the desert of the Colo¬ 
rado and is now famous as the Imperial Valley 
of California. It is the basin into which the 
Colorado River has poured its floods of silt¬ 
laden water many times in ages gone, leaving 
a deposit of soil similar to and as rich as that 
of the valley of the Nile. The river filled the 
basin with water, formed a bar across the south 
end, and then returned to its old course to the 
Gulf of California, and in time the water 
evaporated and the basin again became a desert. 
Its lowest depression, -when the white man first 
saw it, was nearly 300 feet below' the level of 
the sea, and there salt springs bubbled up, 
evaporated and left deposits of salt that gave 
the basin its later name of Salton Sink. 
In 1905 an irrigation company, engaged in 
the work of reclaiming the desert, cut an intake 
in the bank of the Colorado below the Mexican 
border, and that year the river rose to an un¬ 
precedented flood level, carried away the head- 
works and inundated the valley, cutting two 
deep, wide channels to Salton Sink, which it 
filled with water to a depth of eighty feet in the 
center, creating a lake of 400 square miles area 
which is called Salton Sea. 
The break was closed in the spring of 1907 
and the valley and its irrigation system were 
saved at a cost of millions. The two channels, 
in some places sixty feet deep and a mile wide, 
remained as New River and the Alamo, and 
now serve to drain the valley and carry waste 
waters to Salton Sea. 
Before the work of reclamation began, the 
desert was a grim, arid waste, shunned by all 
living things but those that creep and crawl. 
When the water came, the birds saw it from 
afar and followed man in his pioneering. Hun¬ 
dreds of square miles of alfalfa, grain and trees 
have made the land habitable to man and bird 
and beast, and the wildfowl have found it a 
land of good feeding and have taken it for their 
own. The winter invasion of ducks and geese 
is the delight of sportsmen and the bugbear of 
grain farmers, and the game laws are suspended 
in the valley by common consent. It is idle to 
talk of close seasons and bag limits to a man 
who finds a forty-acre field of sprouting barley 
ruined in a night by the bills and puddling feet 
of an army of ducks. After working all day he 
cannot sit up all night watching his field, and 
therefore he invites men to come from the towns 
with guns and kill off some of the marauders, 
advertising that he gives free breakfast to hun¬ 
ters. Wherefore the pop of the shotgun is heard 
all night in Imperial Valley, and by replanting 
their fields two or three times in the season the 
farmers manage to grow a barley crop. 
The farmers’ boys—and some of the gunners 
ALAMO RIVER NEAR SALTON SEA. 
from the towns—have found that once the ducks 
have alighted upon good feeding ground, it is 
almost impossible to drive them off before day¬ 
light. So they go out just before sunrise, creep 
up to the ditch banks and take pot shots into the 
flocks. 
One night a valley farmer went out with lan¬ 
tern and shovel to attend to the irrigation of his 
field, for one must use’the water when the Zan- 
jero sees fit to turn it into the ditches. From 
TWO HUNDRED FEET BELOW SEA LEVEL. 
the other side of the field a party of gunners 
raised a regiment of ducks, and the birds moved 
across, flying low and determined not to leave 
the feeding ground. With a rush and a deafen¬ 
ing whirr the ducks charged straight upon the 
rancher, whose lantern probably blinded them. 
The man dropped the lantern and swung the 
shovel in self-defense, and it is on record that 
he knocked down four ducks with that homely 
weapon, and secured them. Dealers in sporting 
goods, in their advertisements, advise hunters not 
to rely upon the shovel, however, but to “get a 
gun.” 
On their way to and from the fields the ducks 
follow the water courses, and that makes good 
flight shooting along the lower reaches of the 
two rivers. Where the rivers widen and the 
bottom lands are partly overflowed in winter, 
when but little water is being used on the farms, 
tules have grown in irregular clumps, various 
grasses have appeared on the moist flats, and 
there the ducks find shelter and feed during the 
day. Market hunters wade the swamps and 
make big bags by creeping behind the tule 
patches and taking pot shots into close huddled 
sleeping flocks. 
Early in the winter, before the market hun¬ 
ters had harassed and hazed the ducks out of 
the tule ponds of the Alamo, thousands of the 
Birds fed at night in the flat close by the gun 
dub’s camp, and the noise they made disturbed 
the rest of the members that were not sound 
sleepers. The secretary’s first night in camp 
was one of “excursions and alarms.” 
He was sure he heard the noise of turbulent 
waters and falling banks, and three times he 
rolled out of his blankets and went to the bank 
overlooking the flat, fully expecting to see a flood 
pouring down the Alamo, as in the time of the 
Colorado’s big break. For many minutes he 
stood there in the chill night, barefooted and 
hugging a blanket around his shoulders, peering 
into the dark and listening to the intermittent 
roar that sounded so much like the tumbling of 
earth into the river. It was difficult for him to 
convince himself, even when he saw that there 
was no rise of water over the flat, that the dis¬ 
turbance was made by ducks rising from and 
alighting in the shallow pools. A few thousand 
ducks beating the water and the air with their 
wings can make a prodigious noise. 
Many species of ducks make a winter resort 
of Imperial Valley from Salton Sea to the Gulf 
of California, sprig, greenwing teal and mallard 
being the most numerous, and they all grow fat 
and superlatively edible on the barley and vari¬ 
ous wild grasses. During the season of 1908-9 
the varieties killed on the gun club, ten miles 
up the Alamo from Salton Sea, were sprig or 
pintail, greenwing teal, mallard, canvasback, red¬ 
head, widgeon, brown or fulvous-bellied tree 
duck and the little ruddy duck, called wire-tail, 
butterball and a dozen other names. A few 
cinnamon teal have been shot along the canals, 
but they are not numerous. One canvasback 
killed on the club grounds seemed to be a cross 
with the redhead. The head and bill were un¬ 
mistakably canvasback, but the iris was yellow 
and the belly was white. 
On the table a fat, barley-fed sprig is superior 
to the canvasback, and any duck in good condi¬ 
tion shot in the valley is more toothsome than 
the best of the coast birds. The little ruddy 
duck is a delicious morsel, and the mallards and 
widgeon of course are good. The brown tree 
duck, common in Mexico, is a comparative 
stranger north of the line, but in one evening 
flight when ducks of all sorts were passing the 
blind in every direction, I put down two of that 
species, and single specimens were secured now 
and then through the earlier part of the season. 
The flesh of the tree duck proved to be very 
tender and finely flavored. There is but little 
of the wild taste and no trace of fishy flavor in 
any of the ducks killed in the valley. 
Flights of the Canada goose and the Western 
black brant are quite common, but very few of 
the birds are killed. Early in the morning large 
