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Voices of a New England Marsh
BY WILLIAM BREWSTER

O most people a fresh water marsh has little to oﬂer in the way of

I beauty or attractiveness. Indeed it is quite generally regarded as so

much waste land; unsightly from its primitive condition; unprofit»

able because of the difﬁculty of harvesting its coarse and unnutritious

grasses; even prejudicial to the comfort and health of those who dwell near

it by reason of the swarms of venomous mosquitoes and noisy frogs which

it harbors and the noxious, malarial vapors which it is popularly supposed to generate.

Such at least appears to be the consensus of opinion respecting the Fresh Pond marshes at Cambridge, although from the time of Nuttall and the Cabots to the present day they have been to a small, but steadily increasing number of nature lovers and sportsmen, an inexhaustible source of interest and enjoyment. During this period they have suffered many and grievous changes, but there yet remains an ‘ unimproved' area sufficiently large and primitive to attract and shelter innumerable muskrats, a few minks and, at the proper seasons, many species of wading and water birds. The voices of these and other marsh-frequenting'creatures have always had for me an absorbing interest—due largely, no doubt, to the extreme diﬂiculty of dis- entangling and identifying them; as the editor of BIRD-LORI: encourages me to think that they may also interest some of its readers I have attempted, in the present paper, to describe the sounds with which I am more or less familiar, at the same time brieﬂy sketching some of the more characteristic habits of their authors and touching still more lightly on the aspects which their favorite haunts wear at the different seasons.

Through the long New England winter the Fresh Pond marshes are encased in glittering ice or buried deep under a mantle of wind-sculptured snow. Flocks of Snow Buntings occasionally circle over them; Shrikes and Hawks of several kinds perch on the isolated trees to watch for prey;