Sometimes We Rode In The Canoe, Sometimes Tramped Along The Easy
Shore.
Once I came across a Great Homed Owl in the grass by the
water.
He had a fish over a foot long, and flew with difficulty
when be bore it off. Another time I saw a Horned Owl mobbed by two
Wiskajons. Spruce Partridge as well as the Ruffed species became
common: one morning some of the former marched into camp at
breakfast time. Rob called them "Chickens"; farther south they are
called "Fool Hens," which is descriptive and helps to distinguish
them from their neighbours - the "Sage Hens." Frequently now we
heard the toy-trumpeting and the clack of the Pileated Woodpecker
or Cock-of-the-Pines, a Canadian rather than a Hudsonian species.
One day, at our three o'clock meal, a great splendid fellow of the
kind gave us a thrill. "Clack-clack-clack," we heard him coming,
and he bounded through the air into the trees over our camp. Still
uttering his loud "Clack-clack-clack," he swung from tree to tree
in one long festoon of flight, spread out on the up-swoop like an
enormous black butterfly with white-starred wings. "Clack-clack-clack,"
he stirred the echoes from the other shore, and ignored us as he
swooped and clanged. There was much in his song of the Woodpecker
tang; it was very nearly the springtime "cluck-cluck" of a magnified
Flicker in black; and I gazed with open mouth until he thought
fit to bound through the air to another woods.
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