tote a Ube BONG BU Tle kor ik N ai 
with its comical long bill. It did not seem afraid and when I set it down 
beside me on my coat it remained for some minutes. 
Bitterns made another May day memory. In the morning as I entered 
Oak Woods through the main gateway I saw a couple of friends a short 
distance away, pointing excitedly at a spot to my left. There not twenty 
feet: from a busy city street stood a bittern “frozen.”” We walked to within 
a few feet of it and it never batted an eye. With its long outstretched 
neck I thought it would have served Alice in her strange game of croquet 
quite as well as her flamingo. Later in the day we were driving in the 
country and saw another bittern in display not far from the highway. 
I had never guessed he owned the beautiful plumes now spreading over his 
shoulders as a part of his wedding suit. People seldom see them, since they 
are hidden except in his hours of courtship. 
As I follow through my year’s scroll I find that, next to May, August 
and early September furnish the most pictures, for then the shore birds 
return from the north, many having gone beyond the Arctic Circle to nest. 
From the south come the young of the American egret and the little blue 
heron. They wander far from home, out to see the world before settling 
down to adult life. 
The city dump at. Lake Calumet was long the paradise of the least 
squeamish of the local ornithologists because there could be found many 
species of shore birds and such unusual ones as dowitchers, knots, turn- 
stones, and phalaropes. But recently a new highway has been put through 
the slough where they congregated and few come any more. This year we 
found that a dump for the near-by city of Hammond is quite as good 
for birds and much better from an esthetic standpoint, as it does not seem 
to have been used for garbage for a number of years, the odor is gone, 
and it is partially overgrown with vegetation. There is a fairly large body 
of shallow water and here the ducks, teal, and shore birds gather by the 
hundreds. It is a lonely and desolate place and my memory of it at sunset 
with its little white clouds of sandpipers, and darker ones of teal, rising 
and settling again on the water, the snipe and king rails slipping from their 
hiding places into the open, the indescribably lovely calls of the shore birds, 
haunts me like a poem. 
Near the close of every year I say I probably shall not make a list 
for the next year, but down in my heart I know that New Year’s Day 
will find me somewhere in the park or along the lake, looking for a gull, 
a junco, a cardinal, or even a winter robin with which to begin the com- 
ing year’s list. 
Chicago, Ill. 
ft ft I 
THE PERIOD for the annual Christmas census is at hand and we should be 
glad to receive reports from any of our readers for publication in our 
next number. 
