Page:Bird-lore Vol 01.djvu/129

 J)^=- W'"-"^ ^Mll In the Spartina with the Swallows BY O. WIDMANN APLE LAKE, in St. Charles county, Mo., is one of a series of lakes situated between the bluffs and the Mississippi River. The bluffs are four to five miles from the river bank, thus leaving a wide stretch of alluvial land, lowest toward the bluffs, forming an ex- tended, nearly level marsh, mostly too wet and poor for cultivation, and covered with square miles of cord- grass (^Spar/ina cyiiostiroides). In dry summers or on higher levels it reaches only a height of three or four feet, but in wet summers, as for instance in i8g8, it attains the stately height of six to eight feet, with such a dense growth of rigid leaves that it is hard work to walk or even drive through. As a commercial article it is worth very little, though it will make good paper. When young it is liked b}' horses and cattle, and when two feet high it makes pretty good hay, which is sometimes baled and sold as prairie hay. But while man does not yet know how to make good use of it, birds do, especially some species of the families Hirundinidae and Icteridae — the Swallow and Blackbird families — who find in the spar- tina the material for a good and safe dormitory. Hundreds of acres of this grass cover the region about Maple Lake, and as they are within the confines of one of the best managed club grounds, where neither plow nor cattle, neither drainage nor fire are allowed, they serve many kinds of birds for a roosting place at all seasons of the year, but especially in fall migration. Of Swallows, the most numerous frequenters are the Eaves, the Tree or Whitebreasts, and the Roughwings, and they show their appreciation of this rare place of security and peace by coming early in the season and staying late. When the Eaves have become strangers at their breeding stations for a long time, the marsh is the place to find them in plent}'. Here is the place to look for the first Whitebreast of the year as early as the second week of March, and for the last, in the third week of October. For two months, from the middle of August to the middle of October, a cloud of Swallows may be seen every evening, just before dark, hovering over the most remote and inaccessible part of the immense spartina waste, and wherever you are in the marsh in the late afternoon, you cannot fail to notice innumerable Swal- lows skimming the grassy ocean and the adjacent lakes. If toward sunset you Avatch them closely, you will find that, though they may linger long on some favorite hunting ground, the general (115)