Gulls, great and small, with graceful marsh-terns, floated spectre-like, surveying in solitude and silence arid wastes where before they had found aquatic Edens. Once or twice we also noticed the small white herons (buff-backed and egret) flying disconsolately over their lost homes. A similar remark would apply to most of the other marsh-breeders—we need not recapitulate them all. Stilts, for example, and avocets remained perforce in single blessedness—the latter in noisy querulous bands, quite wild and showing no tendency to assume spring notes or habits. We did chance on a single avocet’s nest, where, in other years, we have found hundreds. The same with the stilts—they also retained winter ways. Curiously on May 17—one wet day—two male stilts had a regular set-to over an irresponsive female; the only symptom of their love-making we noticed all that spring!
Here, in the very height of what ought to have been the breeding-season, we had all these birds (and many others), instead of hovering overhead and shrieking in one’s ear, flying wild in great packs at 100 yards.
How came it to pass that the normal vernal impulse was neglected for a whole season, unfelt and unrecognised—what was the precise psychological reason? It reads ridiculous to assume that any feathered husband should deliberately remark: “Now, Angelina, don’t you agree that it would be imprudent our attempting to raise a family this drought-struck season?” Nor could the neglect arise from physical weakness, since the birds were strong and wild. Such specimens as we shot proved plump and well favoured, though the generative organs disclosed a hybernal obsolescence. One explanation—indeed a rough-and-ready diagnosis that seemed to cover the ground—was given by Vasquez. Now Vasquez is our Guarda of the marisma; he is not scientific, but has been in charge of the wilderness and its wildfowl these thirty years and, more than all, he is observant. This rough keeper perhaps understands the inner lives of wildfowl, with the causes that actuate their movements and habits, better than our best scientists, and Vasquez told us in February: “This year no birds will breed here; the conditions necessary to calientár los ovários [literally, to warm up the ovaries] are wanting.” The subsequent course of events, corroborated by the evidence of dissection, proved the correctness of his forecast.
For a moment we return to the white-faced ducks—no European bird-form less known, or more extravagant. With heavy, swollen beaks, quite disproportionate in size and pale waxy-blue in colour, with white heads, black necks, and rich chestnut bodies, their tiny wings (as well as the sheeny silken plumage) recall those of grebes, but they have long stiff tails like cormorants, and are more tenacious of the water than either of those. To push them on wing is well-nigh impossible. They seek safety in the middle waters and there abide, ignoring threats. To-day, however (May 16), we needed specimens, and by hustling their company between three guns, two mounted keepers, and an old boat that leaked like a sieve we eventually forced them to fly and secured three. They flew entirely in packs (not pairs), rarely many feet above the surface, but with a speed little inferior to pochard or other diving-ducks. Dissection showed that in a female the ovaries had not begun to develop, there were no ripe ova, nor had the oviduct been used. The testes in both the males proved also that here these birds were not yet breeding, or thinking of doing so.
A week earlier, however, at another lake of quite different formation and different plant-growth (thirty miles away), we had found these singular waterfowl already nesting, and append a note of that day:—
Laguna de las Terajes, May 8.—A lonely lagoon hidden away in a saucer-shaped basin amidst sequestered downs; almost the entire extent (twenty acres) choked with dense cane-brakes and thick green reeds which stood six or eight feet above water. We had driven hither, nine miles, across sandy heaths and pine-wood; and while breakfasting on the shore our two canoes (carted here yesterday) were got afloat. Meanwhile, on a patch of open water we had observed several white-faced ducks swimming, deeply immersed, and with their long stiff tails cocked upright at intervals, together with some eared grebes; while marsh-harriers slowly quartered the brakes and the reed-beds rang with the harsh nasal notes of the great sedge-warbler. On pushing out into the aquatic jungle ahead—no light labour with five feet of water encumbered with densely matted canes and the dead tangle of former growths—we soon fell in with nests of all the species above mentioned and several more. Those of the white-faced ducks consisted, first, of a big floating platform of broken canes, upon which was piled a mass of fine dried “duck-weed”—the coots’ nests being formed of flags and reeds alone. None of the ducks’ nests contained eggs; probably the season was too early (in other years we have found their great white eggs, rough-grained, about the third week in May), but possibly the harriers had forestalled us, as we found one egg floating alongside. The grebes were just beginning to lay; their nests, composed of rotten floatage, all awash and malodorous, containing one to three eggs. Next we found two nests of marsh-harriers, immense masses of dead flags, two feet high, supported on floating canes and lined with sticks, heather-stalks, and palmetto. One had four eggs, hard-sat; the other, two eggs, chipping, and two small young in white down, with savage black eyes. The harriers’ eggs are usually dull white; in one nest found this year, however, the eggs were spotted with pale red—apparently blood-stains. Hard by were two nests of the purple water-hen, both of which had obviously been recently robbed by the harriers next door.
These curious birds climb the tall green reeds parrot-wise, grasping four or five at once in their long, supple, heavily clawed toes; then with their powerful red beaks neatly cut down the reeds a yard or more above water, in order to feed on the tender pith. Here and there float masses of these cut-down reeds, split and emptied—comederos, the natives call such spots. But the birds are silly enough to cut down the very reeds that surround their nests—thus exposing the huge piled-up structures to the gaze of their truculent neighbour, the egg-loving marsh-harrier. Instinct badly at fault here.
With a degree more intelligence, the purple water-hens might at least retaliate, by watching their opportunity and mopping-up the harriers’ young. They are amply equipped for such work, having great pincer-like beaks fit to cut barbed wire!