The Tulare--the place of the tule--is the haunt not only of water-birds but innumerable insect-catchers, and especially of the red-winged blackbirds. In the spring these betake themselves to the reed-fringed marshes in hundreds, building their nests in such neighbourly proximity that the young can hop from rim to rim of the tight-slung, grassy hammocks. Great clouds of the young birds can be seen, just before mating and after nesting in the fall, rising from the low islands of the river-junction. In the season also the male yellow-headed blackbird may be heard singing his sweet but noisy cheering-song to his sombre mate as she weaves marsh grass and wet pond-weed together as a foundation for her home, always prudently completed some weeks in advance of any need of it. [Illustration: WAITING FOR DUCK--LOS BAÑOS] Where the tules thin out along the moving currents, numerous woven balls of marsh vegetation hang like some strange fruit safely above the summer rise of the waters. These are the nests of the tule wren, built by the industrious male, with who knows what excess of parental care or what intention to deceive. All the while he is at work upon them, in one, the least conspicuous and apparently the least skilfully built, the mother bird nurses the brown nestlings with which, suddenly at the end of July, all the whispering galleries of the tulares are alive. One who has the courage to penetrate deeper within the tulares, past the crazy wooden landings of nameless ports at which the flat scows put in, past the broken willows where the herons nest and the weedy back-waters lie all smoothly green with the deceptive duck-weed, will see many wished-for sights. Just before dawn and after nightfall the inner marshes are vocal with the varied cries of coot and mallard and the complaining skirl of the mud-hen, the whistling redwing, the bittern booming from his dingy pool, and all the windy beat of wings. But by day a stillness falls through which the clicking whisper of the reeds and the croon of the great rivers cradling to the sea reaches the sense almost with sound. The air is all alive with the metallic glint of dragon-flies; now and then the plop of some shining turtle dropping into the smooth lagoon, or the frightened splash of a marsh-nesting bird, flecks the silence with a flash of sound. Here one might see all the duck kind leading forth their young broods, or the eared grebe swimming with her day-old nestlings on her back. If the day is dark--black clouds with lightnings playing under--one may hear the voice of the loon sliding through his sonorous scale to shaking, witless laughter. Or perhaps the day's sight might be a flock of pelicans on their way to their nesting-ground in Buena Vista, breasting the shallows, and with beating wings driving a school of minnows into some tiny inlet where they may be scooped up in the pouched bills, a dozen to a mouthful. Better still, some morning mist might rise for