At this time of my boy-life most of the daylight hours were spent out
of doors, as when
Not watching the birds in our plantation or asked to
go and look at the flock grazing somewhere a mile or so from home, in
the absence of the shepherd or his boy, I was always away somewhere on
the plain with my small brother on egg-hunting or other expeditions.
In the spring and summer we often visited the lagoons or marshes, the
most fascinating places I knew on account of their abundant wild bird
life. There were four of these lagoons, all in different directions
and all within two or three miles from home. They were shallow
lakelets, called _lagunas,_ each occupying an area of three or four
hundred acres, with some open water and the rest overgrown with bright
green sedges in dense beds, called _pajonales,_ and immense beds of
bulrushes, called _juncales._ These last were always the best to
explore when the water was not deeper than the saddle-girth, and where
the round dark polished stems, crowned with their bright brown tufts,
were higher than our heads when we urged our horses through them.
These were the breeding-places of some small birds that had their
beautifully-made nests a couple of feet or so above the water,
attached in some cases to single, in others to two or three, rush
stems. And here, too, we found the nests of several large species -
egret, night-heron, cormorant, and occasionally a hawk - birds which
build on trees in forest districts, but here on the treeless region of
the pampas they made their nests among the rushes.
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