Holabird, a keen observer, told me that he once saw
the mother carry them from the nest tree in her mouth, quickly coming
and going to a nearby stream, and in a few minutes get them all
together and proudly sail away.
Sometimes a flock of swans were seen passing over at a great height on
their long journeys, and we admired their clear bugle notes, but they
seldom visited any of the lakes in our neighborhood, so seldom that
when they did it was talked of for years. One was shot by a blacksmith
on a millpond with a long-range Sharp's rifle, and many of the
neighbors went far to see it.
The common gray goose, Canada honker, flying in regular harrow-shaped
flocks, was one of the wildest and wariest of all the large birds that
enlivened the spring and autumn. They seldom ventured to alight in our
small lake, fearing, I suppose, that hunters might be concealed in the
rushes, but on account of their fondness for the young leaves of
winter wheat when they were a few inches high, they often alighted on
our fields when passing on their way south, and occasionally even in
our corn-fields when a snowstorm was blowing and they were hungry and
wing-weary, with nearly an inch of snow on their backs.
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