Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXVII, No. 4, October 1850Various
General
Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXVII, No. 4, October 1850
Various
Literature -- Periodicals; Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals
For my own use I invariably adopt for all the smaller species of
duck—as the two varieties of Teal, the Summer Duck, the Golden Eye, and
the Buffel-headed Duck, _Anates_, _Carolinensis_, _Discors_, _Sponsa_,
and _Fuligulæ_, _Clanguid_, and _Albeola_—the same shot which is
generally used for the various birds known on our shores and rivers as
bay-snipe, viz: No. 4 or 5—the latter best for the Plovers, the former
for duck, whether in large or small guns. In this relation I may observe
that, on one occasion—the only one, by the way, on which I ever saw a
green-winged teal in the summer season—I killed a couple of these
beautiful birds, right and left, while woodcock shooting, in Orange
County, New York, with No. 8 shot. They sprang quite unexpectedly from
behind a willow bush, on the Wuwayanda creek, and I dropped them both
quite dead, some what to my own astonishment, and to the utter
astounding of Fat Tom, who witnessed it, into the middle of the stream,
respectively at twenty and twenty-five yards distance. Until I recovered
them I supposed that they were young wood ducks, but on examination they
proved to be young green-winged teal, of that season, in their immature
plumage. This must have been in the last week of July or the first of
August—it was many years since, and as at that time I kept no shooting
diary, I unfortunately am unable to verify the exact date. The birds
must, I conclude, have been bred in that vicinity, by what means I
cannot conjecture, unless that the parent birds might have been wounded
in the spring, and disabled from completing their northern migration,
and that this, as is some times the case with the minor birds of
passage, might have superinduced their breeding in that, for them, far
southern region. In corroboration of this I may add that, in the spring
of 1846, a couple of these birds haunted a small reedy island in front
of my house, on the Passaic, to so late a day in summer—the 29th, if I
do not err, of May—that I sedulously avoided disturbing them, in the
hope that they would breed there. This I yet think would have been the
case but for the constant disturbance of that lovely river throughout
the summer by gangs of ruffianly loafers, with whom the neighboring town
of Newark abounds beyond any other town of its size in the known world,
boating upon its silvery surface day and night, and rendering day and
night equally hideous with their howls and blasphemies.
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