412 
FOREST AND STREAM 
[March 18 , iqi i- 
postal on the date and place I see the next 
squaw hen. J- W. Bushong. 
[The birds seen by our correspondent was 
probably the pileated woodj eel e«\ .• ince at the 
present day the ivory-billed woodpecker is be¬ 
lieved to be confined to the lower Mississippi 
valley and to be extremely local in its distribu¬ 
tion. This is one of the birds that is almost 
extinct in the United States. We hope he will 
let us hear from him as suggested.— Editor.] 
Two Queer Occurrences. 
One very dry summer, a number of years 
ago, water had become a scarcity at our place, 
and so I set about digging for it near the creek 
bed, thinking that the most likely place. Un¬ 
expectedly, I found an abundance of it. so that 
the shallow well filled to the brim before we 
began curbing it with stone. 
Evidently the scarcity had been felt by the 
bird creation, for the place had no more than 
filled with water than English sparrows came 
and sat on the bank and drank. Soon 1 noticed 
a few dead birds floating on the water with 
their necks girdled of feathers. I soon saw how 
this had occurred. Frogs, which were resting 
in the water with their heads out. had captured 
some of the sparrows while drinking and 
dragged them under water to drown them. 
Unable to swallow the birds, they had given 
them up, after girdling their necks. 
Another queer thing occurred in a wet season. 
A swampy piece of ground of a neighbor had 
growing on it a lot of cattail flags. At their 
base water stood at least a foot deep. My two 
little boys were wading in this water, when one 
of them discovered a mouse nest in an old bird’s 
nest, a foot or more above the water. The nest 
contained the old mouse and several young 
ones. Instinct had taught the old mouse that, 
located on or near the ground, the nest would 
be covered by water, so she sought the branches 
of the flag. She must have swam to and fro. 
Clark M. Drake. 
[Frogs are quite ready to eat birds if they 
can. Many years ago a friend going down to 
the beach to shoot shore birds crossed the salt 
Marshall—one of our best East Texas towns—I 
owned a piece of timber land located on the 
shore of Lake Caddo. I preserved all the timber 
on the property except the little spot where 1 
erected a small house to be used as a home 
whi.e fishing and shooting. The care of the 
timber not only kept the little property in its 
primeval state, but made a homelike and an in¬ 
viting place for all bird life, especially the mem¬ 
bers of the red-head family. 
Something like twenty feet from the house 
stood a nice post oak tree, left close by for shade 
purposes. So far as a close external examina¬ 
tion could be made, the tree seemed perfectly 
sound and in fine health. The largest part of 
the trunk was near fifteen inches in diameter. 
Arriving at the piace about noon one day after 
an interval of two weeks—for that was about 
as long as I could stay away from that little 
rest spot—I found a pair of pileated woodpeckers 
in the act of finishing a fine piece of work and 
enjoying a good dinner of ant eggs. 
They had chiseled three holes nearly as large 
as their bodies through about four inches of 
green oak. The first hole was about eight feet 
from the ground; the second one was about 
four feet nearer the ground, and the last one 
was between the first and second. It was an 
easy matter to tell the age of their work by the 
color and dryness of the oak where they had 
chiseled it. To look at their work would make 
you think they used judgment and lots of it. 
The first hole missed because it was too high 
up: the next was too low down, sto they chiseled 
a hole between the two and found the nest. 
I Tow could they tell that tree was not sound, 
and how could they tell it contained the ant nest 
and how could they locate the nest so exactly ? 
J. L. Phillips. 
about nine months ago, and so are small, the 
largest weighing 300 pounds and the smallest 
over 150 pounds. 
The sea elephant is the largest of the earless 
seals, and Captain Scammon reports one that he 
captured which measured twenty feet in length, 
while some authors have assigned them a still 
greater length. Like the other earless seals, the 
sea elephant probably feeds on fish, but after 
all comparatively little is known about their 
habits, although for centuries they have been 
killed for their oil on the Pacific coast, and in 
the Antarctic, where there are still some 
colonies of them, though these are kept down 
to a very low ebb by the constant pursuit of the 
sealers. The name borne by this animal has ref¬ 
erence to the long proboscis of the male, which 
is lacking in the females and young. 
In the year 1&82 Forest and Stream printed 
a long and entertaining account of a vessel from 
New Bedford after sea elephants which was cast 
away on Heard's Island of the Kerguelen Archi¬ 
pelago, where the crew lived for more than a 
year before being finally rescued by a United 
States war vessel. 
Sea Elephants on Exhibition. 
The sea elephant, or elephant seal, has long 
been supposed to be extinct in California, and 
nearly or quite so in Lower California. For¬ 
merly it was abundant in many places on the 
Southern California coast where it was persist¬ 
ently hunted—to extermination. On a few occa- 
meadows and thoughtlessly shot a chimney Hons young specimens have been captured and 
swift that flew by him. When the gunner went have been on exhibition, as for example in San 
forward to recover his bird, he saw that it must 
have fallen in a shallow pool of water, and 
looking for it, saw what seemed to be two 
horns sticking up out of the water. Inspection 
showed the head of a huge bullfrog just above 
the surface and from the two corners of the 
mouth of this frog projected the ends of the 
chimney swift’s wings. 1 he bird had fallen in 
Francisco, and at the Zoological Gardens in 
Philadelphia. 
On March 13, six young specimens of the sea 
elephant were received by the New York Zoo¬ 
logical Society at the Aquarium, where they will 
remain for the present. These specimens were 
captured by Dr. Chas. H. Townsend, the Direc¬ 
tor of the New York Aquarium, who is in 
Barren Ground Caribou Far South. 
According to reports from the North, barren 
ground caribou during the past winter have 
pushed much further south than usual. Ed¬ 
ward Wiley, who has lived all his life in the 
North, is reported in the Edmonton Bulletin as 
saying that never within memory have the cari¬ 
bou come so far south and so close to civiliza¬ 
tion. Lie says that often they come to within 
thirty or forty miles of the Athabasca Lake, but 
that this year they have come up close to the 
settlement on its shores so that every one has 
been out hunting and laying in a supply of cari¬ 
bou meat. They are not especially shy and can 
often be closely approached. 
The migration of the vast herds of caribou 
from their summer to their winter feeding 
grounds is one of the picturesque features of 
the North and is graphically described in War- 
burton Pike’s book, “The Barren Grounds of 
Northern Canada.” In the summer the herds 
separate, the females moving far out on to the 
barren grounds; as far, sometimes, as the Arctic 
Ocean, where the young are born. As autumn 
approaches, the mother and young move south, 
and joined by the males, gather in immense 
herds of hundreds of thousands, bound for the 
timber that stretches for two or three hundred 
miles north and east of Lake Athabasca and 
Great Slave Lake. Here they find shelter from 
the fierce winds that blow over the unprotected 
the water near the frog and had been promptly charge of the expedition sent to California by barren lands off the-Arctic Ocean. As the cold 
swallowed by it. There was no way of getting 
hold of the frog, on account of the very soft 
mud of the pool. Mouse nets in old, birds’ 
nests are not very uncommon. Old marsh 
wrens’ nests in the cattails are often so occu¬ 
pied.— Editor.] 
Woodpecker Carpentry. 
Lufkin, Texas, Feb. 9. — Editor Forest and 
Stream: The article on the pileated woodpecker 
(Picns pilcatus) in the Jan. 21 issue of your 
journal recalls some observations I have made 
the Museum of Natural Llistory and the New 
York Zoological Society, which started some 
weeks ago on the United States Fish Commis¬ 
sion steamship Albatross, with the general pur¬ 
pose of studying the coast of the peninsula of 
Lower California on the Pacific and on the Gulf 
side. 
These young sea elephants were captured on 
Guadalupe Island off the coast of Southern Cali¬ 
fornia, and were shipped in crates by express 
from San Diego, Cal. During their six clays’ 
journey they were of course all the time out of 
on the sagacity of this member of the red-headed water, yet they reached the Aquarium appar- 
family ently in good condition. They are what a cattle- 
About twenty years ago, when a resident of man would call short yearling, having been born 
intensifies, they move further south into denser 
timber to find protection from the cold. It is 
altogether likely that the excessive cold of this 
winter has forced the herds into the thick timber 
that fringes the north shore of Lake Athabasca, 
thereby bringing caribou venison in plenty to 
the larders of Chipewyan. 
Mr. Wylie, in company with George Loutit 
and R. J. McLennan, left Chipewyan on Jan. 12, 
reaching Edmonton in twenty days. They 
traveled with dog teams as far as Lac La Biche, 
where they left their teams, driving in to the 
landing with wagons. 
The winter was very fine in the North up to 
Christmas, when the cold weather first set in. 
) 
