We Always Thought It Great Fun When We Found A Big Assembly Of Coots At Some Distance From The Margin.

Whipping up our horses, we would suddenly charge the flock to see them run and fly in a panic to

The lake and rush over the open water, striking the surface with their feet and raising a perfect cloud of spray behind them.

Coots, however, were common everywhere, but this water was the only breeding-place of the grebe in our neighbourhood; yet here we could find scores of nests any day - scores with eggs and a still greater number of false nests, and we could never tell which had eggs in it before pulling off the covering of wet weeds. Another bird rarely seen at any other spot than this was the painted snipe, a prettily-marked species with a green curved bill. It has curiously sluggish habits, rising only when almost trodden upon, and going off in a wild sacred manner like a nocturnal species, then dropping again into hiding at a short distance. The natives call it _dormilon_ - sleepy-head. On one side of the lagoon, where the ground was swampy and wet, there was always a breeding-colony of these quaint birds; at every few yards one would spring up close to the hoofs, and dismounting we would find the little nest on the wet ground under the grass, always with two eggs so thickly blotched all over with black as to appear almost entirely black.

There were other rushy lagoons at a greater distance which we visited only at long intervals, and one of these I must describe, as it was almost more attractive than any one of the others on account of its bird life. Here, too, there were some kinds which we never found breeding elsewhere.

It was smaller than the other lagoons I have described and much shallower, so that the big birds, such as the stork, wood-ibis, crested screamer, and the great blue ibis, called _vanduria,_ and the roseate spoonbill, could wade almost all over it without wetting their feathers. It was one of those lakes which appear to be drying up, and was pretty well covered with a growth of _camalote_ plant, mixed with reed, sedge, and bulrush patches. It was the only water in our part of the country where the large water-snail was found, and the snails had brought the bird that feeds on them - the large social marsh hawk, a slate-coloured bird resembling a buzzard in its size and manner of flight. But being exclusively a feeder on snails, it lives in peace and harmony with the other bird inhabitants of the marsh. There was always a colony of forty or fifty of these big hawks to be seen at this spot. A still more interesting bird was the jacana, as it is spelt in books, but pronounced ya-sa-NA by the Indians of Paraguay, a quaint rail-like bird supposed to be related to the plover family: black and maroon-red in colour, the wing-quills a shining greenish yellow, it has enormously long toes, spurs on its wings, and yellow wattles on its face. Here I first saw this strange beautiful fowl, and here to my delight I found its nest in three consecutive summers, with three or four clay-coloured eggs spotted with chestnut-red.

Here, too, was the breeding-place of the beautiful black-and-white stilt, and of other species too many to mention. But my greatest delight was in finding breeding in this place a bird I loved more than all the others I have named - a species of marsh trupial, a bird about the size of the common cowbird, and like it, of a uniform deep purple, but with a cap of chestnut-coloured feathers on its head. I loved this bird for its song - the peculiar delicate tender opening notes and trills. In spring and autumn large flocks would occasionally visit our plantation, and the birds in hundreds would settle on a tree and all sing together, producing a marvellous and beautiful noise, as of hundreds of small bells all ringing at one time. It was by the water I first found their breeding-place, where about three or four hundred birds had their nests quite near together, and nests and eggs and the plants on which they were placed, with the solicitous purple birds flying round me, made a scene of enchanting beauty. The nesting-site was on a low swampy piece of ground grown over with a semi-aquatic plant called _durasmillo_ in the vernacular. It has a single white stalk, woody in appearance, two to three feet high, and little thicker than a man's middle finger, with a palm-like crown of large loose lanceolate leaves, so that it looks like a miniature palm, or rather an ailanthus tree, which has a slender perfectly white bole. The solanaceous flowers are purple, and it bears fruit the size of cherries, black as jet, in clusters of three to five or six. In this forest of tiny palms the nests were hanging, attached to the boles, where two or three grew close together; it was a long and deep nest, skilfully made of dry sedge leaves woven together, and the eggs were white or skim-milk blue spotted with black at the large end.

That enchanting part of the marsh, with its forest of graceful miniature trees, where the social trupials sang and wove their nests and reared their young in company - that very spot is now, I dare say, one immense field of corn, lucerne, or flax, and the people who now live and labour there know nothing of its former beautiful inhabitants, nor have they ever seen or even heard of the purple- plumaged trupial, with its chestnut cap and its delicate trilling song. And when I recall these vanished scenes, those rushy and flowery meres, with their varied and multitudinous wild bird life - the cloud of shining wings, the heart-enlivening wild cries, the joy unspeakable it was to me in those early years - I am glad to think I shall never revisit them, that I shall finish my life thousands of miles removed from them, cherishing to the end in my heart the image of a beauty which has vanished from earth.

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