The great variety of the waterfowl of the Pacific Coast, the wonderful
numbers in which they are found and the excellent shooting they
afford, forms a subject, which, to do it justice, would require the
space of an ordinary volume.
With the exception of the Gulf tier of the Southern states, waterfowl
on the Atlantic Coast are but birds of passage, tarrying for a time on
their way to milder winter quarters; tourists loitering for a day or
two at attractive by-stations as they wing their way south in the fall
and again on their return north in the spring. They are leaving the
isolation of the far north or the mountain lakes and marshes where
they spent the summer rearing their young and they are seeking more
favorable feeding grounds in the milder climate of the South, where
animal and vegetable life is not in the state of hibernation which
prevents it from furnishing them with an abundance of food during
their southern sojourn.
Over the larger portion of our hunting grounds what is the beginning
of the calendar year is in fact the beginning of our spring. When the
frost king lays his hand upon all vegetable and insect life in the
East, spreading his white shroud over field and pasture and breaking
with his icy sleet from the vine and the brush their clinging leaves;
when from the trees have fallen the last vestige of their autumnal
crowns of gold and crimson; when the last flower has shed its petals;
when the last hum of insect is heard and the last song of bird has
died away on the southern horizon--'tis then the early rains of the
Coast start the new sown grain in the fields, give life again to the
grasses of the plains, carpet the foothills and the valleys with the
gold and purple and crimson of innumerable flowers, and our veritable
spring commences.
With us, therefore, waterfowl are not passing pilgrims, tarrying for a
few days only as they rest and feed on their way to the open waters
and green pastures in which they intend to pass those months marked
winter on the calendar of the year. They are not mere hurrying flocks
alighting now and again as they wing their way back to their breeding
grounds in the spring But ours is the Mecca to which they journey;
ours the feeding grounds on which they assemble from the lakes and
marshes of the Arctic; from the whole chain of the Aleutian Islands;
from the inland seas of British Columbia and from the mountain lakes
of our own Sierras from Washington to Mexico. Here on the bays,
estuaries and marshes of the coast and the lakes and ponds of the
valleys, throughout the whole length of these hunting grounds,
countless millions of these birds have found their winter feeding
grounds for unnumbered ages. No cold, no ice, no snow, no howling
blizzards to stop them in their search for food or disturb their
midday rest upon our quiet waters. In warmth they feed upon the tender
shoots of the young grasses that fringe their watery haunts or bask in
sunshine on the sandy shores.
It is the popular impression that all ducks breed in the far north and
migrate from there south. One has only to shoot on the lakes of Mexico
to learn how erroneous this impression is, for one will meet varieties
quite common there that rarely if ever reach the southern boundaries
of the United States.
The masked duck (=Nomonyx dominicus=) is a purely southern species
reaching Mexico only in its breeding season. The three species of the
Mexican tree duck, quite common in that country, come but little into
the United States. One of these, the black-bellied tree duck
(=Dendrocygna autumnalis=) migrates to some little extent into Texas
and to less extent into New Mexico and Arizona. The fulvous tree duck
(=Dendrocygna fulva=) extends its migrations still farther north,
breeding to considerable extent in Arizona and southern California,
but rarely seen as far north as the center of the state. The other
species of the genus (=Dendrocygna elegans=), for which I know no
English name, is even rare as far south as southern Jalisco. The
cinnamon teal is a southern duck, breeding in Arizona, Texas and
southern California but so rarely seen north of San Francisco that a
gentleman who had killed a straggler near Marysville, when showing it
to me, said that he couldn't find a man in the town who could tell him
what it was. Yet the cinnamon teal is very common in Mexico and
Arizona and quite plentiful in southern California in the spring,
before the flocks break up and the birds seek their nesting places.
Northern bred ducks and purely northern species visit us in great
numbers during the winter months, and to these must be added the vast
number of these birds that breed in the mountains throughout our
hunting grounds.
The ornithologist divides the ducks into two subfamilies; the
fresh-water ducks forming the subfamily, =Anatinae=, and the salt-water
ducks the subfamily, =Fullgilinae=. These two families can easily be
distinguished by their feet. If a salt-water duck, the hind toe will
be found to have a small web or flap on the under side, but if the
bird belongs to the fresh-water group, the toe will be as clean as any
land bird.
[Illustration: MALLARD (Anas boschas)]