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I had stood there a few days before, while watching to determine the air paths and lines of flight that sheldrakes use in passing up and down the lake, for birds have runways, or rather flyways, just as foxes do. Mooween evidently knew the spot; the alders showed that he was heading straight for it, to look out on the lake and see what the alarm was about.

Whereupon Koskomenos swept away to his watchtower above the minnow pool, and the hawk set his wings toward the outlet, where a brood of young sheldrakes were taking their first lessons in the open water. No wonder the birds look askance at Kingfisher. His head is ridiculously large; his feet ridiculously small.

He could tell, perhaps, at what time we should arrive, but not how far it was. We saw a few wood-ducks, sheldrakes, and black ducks, but they were not so numerous there at that season as on our river at home. We scared the same family of wood-ducks before us, going and returning.

The same thing is true on the lake shores. A curious thing, in this connection, is that while a kingfisher will allow none of his kind to poach on his preserves, he lives at peace with the brood of sheldrakes that occupy the same stretch of river. And the sheldrake eats a dozen fish to his one.

As with the kingfishers and sheldrakes, each pair of birds seem to have their own pond or portion; but by what old law of the waters they find and stake their claim is yet to be discovered. There were two little ones in the nest when I first found it; and I used to watch them in the intervals when nothing was stirring in the underbrush near my hiding place.

With half-spread wings he whirled and leaped about the lady while every feather on her slim, blue body expressed infinite boredom and indifference to his passionate appeal. Ruddy sheldrakes, mallards, shoveler ducks, and teal were in even the smallest ponds and avocets with sky-blue legs and slender recurved bills ran along the shores of a lake at which we stopped for tiffin.

Some sheldrakes and wallabies were seen, and a bustard was shot by Charley: large fish were splashing in the water. I gathered the large vine-bean, with green blossoms, which had thick pods containing from one to five seeds. Its hard covering, by roasting, became very brittle; and I pounded the cotyledons, and boiled them for several hours.

Swarms of sheldrakes were perching in the trees, and, as we approached, they rose with a loud noise, flying up and down the lagoon, and circling in the air around us. A chain of water-holes, fringed with Mangrove myrtle, changed, farther to the westward, into a creek, which had no connection with the river, but was probably one of the heads of the Nassau.

The mergansers have narrow, hooked, saw-toothed beaks quite unlike those of the sheldrakes, and their habits are entirely dissimilar. The brahminy ducks, although rather tough, are not bad eating. We usually found them feeding in fields not far from the river or in flooded rice dykes, and very often sitting in pairs on the sand banks near the water.

They were like old friends, for we had met them first in far Yün-nan and on the Burma frontier during the winter of 1916-17 whence they had gone to escape the northern cold; now they were on their summer breeding grounds. The sheldrakes glowed like molten gold when the sun found them in the grass, and we could not have killed the beautiful birds even had we needed them for food.