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of several pairs of chestnut-collared longspurs — strikingly colored birds 
with a bounding flight. The males sang their pretty songs from patches of 
wolfberry, Symphoricarpus occidentalis; they sounded something like west- 
ern meadowlarks in miniature. 
Arrowwood Refuge consists of bottomland along the James River be- 
tween bluffs covered with gramma grass. Wilfred Hill drove us about and 
showed us one of their band of five antelope. Bobolinks were abundant. 
Arrowwood, like all the other refuges we visited in the Dakotas were made 
by the W.P.A. and C.C.C. in the middle thirties. We did not see many ducks 
here; the small farm and wayside sloughs are far more productive in rais- 
ing ducks than are the large lakes. Part of the trouble les in the tech- 
nique of keeping the water level too high in the refuges; ducks need marshes 
for nesting, not deep lakes. 
On Devil’s Lake we met a mighty concourse of birds — ruddy ducks, 
horned and eared grebes, yellow-heads, redwings, Brewer’s blackbirds, black 
terns and two hundred shrieking Franklin gulls. North Dakota was suffer- 
ing from drought and we drove for hours through a great dust storm, pass- 
ing through Ripley, the “geographical center of North America,” seeing 
many ducks, terns, gulls and nesting coots on the potholes, noting many 
deserted farm houses, and admiring the shelter belts. 
From. Bottineau we explored the Turtle Mountains with Bruce Harris 
of the State Fish and Game Department. These low, rolling hills were a 
treat after all the level farming country and rolling prairie in the Dakotas. 
There were paper birches and balm of Gileads, bur oaks and green ashes, 
aspens and blooming saskatoon, a different species from the eastern June- 
berry. On every little lake and siough there was at least one pair of ducks, 
often several — mallards, baldpates, blue-winged teal, ring-necks and canvas- 
backs. Clay-colored sparrows gave their buzzy songs. Flicker-tails (Rich- 
ardson’s ground squirrels) peered at us from the bushes. In one woods 
_ there was a chorus of song — least flycatcher, yellow warbler, warbling 
vireo, rose-breasted grosbeak and veery. Here we found large yellow violets, 
Viola eriocarpa, and the most enchanting pink woods violet, Viola rugulosa, 
white to pale pink on the face, magenta on the back. 
At the Lower Souris Refuge, Howard Hennicke showed us the sights. 
These included eared and Holboell’s grebes, ten species of ducks, and eleven 
of shorebirds, four of them new to our list — upland plover, Wilson snipe, 
northern phalarope and marbled godwits. In fall the refuge men feed 
20,000 bushels of grain to migrating ducks, calculating that they save the 
farmers 85,000 bushels of wheat and barley, as the ducks waste more of the 
swathed grain than they eat. 
North Dakota is a region of immense farms with few houses and these 
for the most part bare of trees and shrubs. For several days we made our 
headquarters at the Gateway Hotel in Westhope, exploring the country roads 
with their fascinating potholes. We watched shovellers, pintails, mallards 
and occasional ruddies and gadwalls; saw horned grebes and coots on their 
nests, an occasional pair of Wilson’s phalaropes, the spectacular yellow- 
heads, and ever-present redwings. Vesper, Savannah and clay-colored spar- 
