How came it to pass that the normal vernal impulse was neglected for a whole season, unfelt and unrecognised--what was the precise psychological reason? It reads ridiculous to assume that any feathered husband should deliberately remark: "Now, Angelina, don't you agree that it would be imprudent our attempting to raise a family this drought-struck season?" Nor could the neglect arise from physical weakness, since the birds were strong and wild. Such specimens as we shot proved plump and well favoured, though the generative organs disclosed a hybernal obsolescence. One explanation--indeed a rough-and-ready diagnosis that seemed to cover the ground--was given by Vasquez. Now Vasquez is our Guarda of the marisma; he is not scientific, but has been in charge of the wilderness and its wildfowl these thirty years and, more than all, he is observant. This rough keeper perhaps understands the inner lives of wildfowl, with the causes that actuate their movements and habits, better than our best scientists, and Vasquez told us in February: "This year no birds will breed here; the conditions necessary to _calientár los ovários_ [literally, to warm up the ovaries] are wanting." The subsequent course of events, corroborated by the evidence of dissection, proved the correctness of his forecast. * * * * * For a moment we return to the white-faced ducks--no European bird-form less known, or more extravagant. With heavy, swollen beaks, quite disproportionate in size and pale waxy-blue in colour, with white heads, black necks, and rich chestnut bodies, their tiny wings (as well as the sheeny silken plumage) recall those of grebes, but they have long stiff tails like cormorants, and are more tenacious of the water than either of those. To push them on wing is well-nigh impossible. They seek safety in the middle waters and there abide, ignoring threats. To-day, however (May 16), we needed specimens, and by hustling their company between three guns, two mounted keepers, and an old boat that leaked like a sieve we eventually forced them to fly and secured three. They flew entirely in packs (not pairs), rarely many feet above the surface, but with a speed little inferior to pochard or other diving-ducks. Dissection showed that in a female the ovaries had not begun to develop, there were no ripe ova, nor had the oviduct been used. The _testes_ in both the males proved also that here these birds were not yet breeding, or thinking of doing so. A week earlier, however, at another lake of quite different formation and different plant-growth (thirty miles away), we had found these singular waterfowl already nesting, and append a note of that day:-- [Illustration: WHITE-FACED DUCK (_Erísmatura leucocephala_). See also p. 28.]