4 THe -A DU DUB O.N! BU DG Eat 
around it that makes it look as if it were covered with quicksilver. It 
builds itself a nest under water which it furnishes with bubbles of air from 
the surface. 
As we passed an old orchard we noticed a large hare sitting quietly, 
but soon it hurried away. Dr. Lorenz told us that he used to bring his 
pet ravens down into these meadows and that the golden orioles used tc 
dart at them, giving a kestrel-like alarm note. 
On the way home we discovered, on a pond by the Danube, one of Dr. 
Lorenz’ mallard ducks with eleven ducklings. He had raised her the 
previous year together with her six brothers and four graylag geese; the 
whole flock had paddled about after him. The mallards and geese flew 
together for awhile, the duck continuing to do so longer than the drakes; 
she and the geese would accompany their “father” to the meadows and in 
this way she became acquainted with this region. She mated with one of 
her brothers, and he was staying home. Dr. Lorenz said that she would 
return in the late summer as soon as the young could fly. 
On another day Dr. Lorenz took me in his kayak across the Danube 
and into the back waters on the other side where everything is wild. Here 
we found kingfishers as brilliant as burnished beetles, mallards and 
garganies, and all the birds I had met on the south side of the river. 
Cormorants and gray herons fiew down 
the river; common sandpipers (resem- 
bling our spotted sandpipers minus the 
spots) and cunning little ringed plovers 
ran along the sandy banks. We landed 
on an island in midstream, to the great 
indignation of some dozen pairs of com- 
mon terns; here we found three nests 
with one, two, and three large, darkly 
mottled eggs, besides two young, one hid- 
ing in a bush, the other big enough to 
eject the fish it had just received and 
fly out over the water. 
One afternoon in mid-June I was 
invited by a young ornithologist, Her- 
mann Kacher, to go with him to see some 
A) nests. He led me further down the 
Danube than I had been by myself, 
through woods and tall wet grass to the 
bush that held a ring dove’s nest. It was 
empty; we wondered whether the family of noisy magpies nearby knew 
anything about it. Finally we came to Hermann’s prize—a golden oriole 
nest high in a sapling too small to climb. It was pensile, but not half so 
deep as that of a Baltimore oriole. Both parents work together to con- 
struct it, in contrast to our orioles where the female is the architect. 
Hermann shook the tree, but nothing happened. Soon, however, mother 
oriole came and squawked at her visitors. “Wie eine Katze,” said Hermann. 
My last long walk along the Danube was on the 18th of June. There 
were poppies in the wheat and new flowers in the meadows, gold and pink 
European kingfisher 
