12 DHE? YAsU DSU BiO°N® GOs baa aie 
Wood ducks breed here, rearing their young in hollow holes of trees 
bordering the water, or in boxes which the game wardens have placed in 
trees for them. Ornithologists used to wonder how the young wood ducks 
got down from the nest for the first time, often a distance of ten to thirty 
feet from the ground. Some believed that the mother carried the ducklings 
down on her back; some thought she carried them down between her feet; 
others said they probably fell down by themselves. Actual motion pictures 
taken by the Illinois Natural History Survey along the Illinois River have 
given us the answer in indisputable form. The young birds get down by 
themselves, half flying, half flopping; they can’t fly much at that stage, but 
they use their half-grown wings enough to break the fall. Nearly all of 
them apparently survive that initial bounce. How is that for “starting life 
with a bang?” 
In the swampy floodplain back from the shore of the lake, we found 
hordes of colorful birds. Carolina wrens “tea-kettled” all day long; a 
prothonotary warbler darted to its nest hole in a stump, with insects for 
hungry mouths, while from afar came the ringing “sweet-sweet-sweet- 
sweet” of another prothonotary not so busy. The penetrating whistle of the 
titmouse at times drowned out all other calls, but we managed to identify 
the wood thrush, Carolina chickadee, Kentucky warbler, pewee, least fiy- 
catcher, red-bellied woodpecker and redstart as interesting residents. Two 
black vultures and a red-shouldered hawk sailed overhead as we reached a 
clearing, and through an opening leading to the lake I spotted the stiff out- 
line of a double-crested cormorant flying by. Suddenly, from a thicket, 
came the sound I had been waiting for — an explosive series of notes 
apparently aimed directly at me. I listened a moment, then moved closer 
to the source. Again came that outburst of saucy abuse, clearly intended 
to put me in my place. Over and over it bubbled, “Get out! Beat it!” 
Finally the voluble songster popped into view, a pert, sarcastic little white- 
eyed vireo, still giving this intruder a piece of his mind. He soon dis- 
appeared just as quickly as he had come. But out of the temporary silence 
echoed a loud ringing call, the song of the pileated woodpecker, regular 
resident of Reelfoot’s swampy forests. 
I heard this resonant call again several days later while poling our flat 
boat between the willows and cypress and low-bending water elms of Big 
Lake Wildlife Refuge in Arkansas. This unusual refuge covers 7,000 acres 
of water and is eleven miles long. Parts of it are open, except for lotus 
which has largely replaced American pondweed, but in much of it we had 
to thread our way between crowded clumps of willows, swamp privet, river 
birch and buttonbush, watching for floating dead logs at the surface or just 
underneath so as not to ram the boat, and with one eye peeled for the com- 
mon water snake and more rare moccasin. The shallow mucky water was a 
paradise for submerged plants, and we had no trouble hauling up from the 
bottom long strands of ceratophyllum with whorled finely dissected leaves, 
naias, bladderwort bearing the tiny bladders which float the plant af the 
time of flowering, and Potamogeton pondweeds. On the stems of submerged 
lotus were swarms of tiny animals which looked like snails in white trans- 
lucent shells, but which proved to be the larval stage of a long-horned leaf 
