This is especially true of the dusky duck, more generally known by the
name black duck among hunters. He is indeed a wild duck, so wild that
one must study him with a gun, and study him long before he knows much
about him. An ordinary tramp with a field-glass and eyes wide open
may give a rare, distant view of him; but only as one follows him as a
sportsman winter after winter, meeting with much less of success than
of discouragement, does he pick up many details of his personal life;
for wildness is born in him, and no experience with man is needed to
develop it. On the lonely lakes in the midst of a Canada forest, where
he meets man perhaps for the first time, he is the same as when he
builds at the head of some mill pond within sight of a busy New
England town. Other ducks may in time be tamed and used as decoys; but
not so he. Several times I have tried it with wing-tipped birds; but
the result was always the same. They worked night and day to escape,
refusing all food and even water till they broke through their pen, or
were dying of hunger, when I let them go.
One spring a farmer, with whom I sometimes go shooting, determined to
try with young birds. He found a black duck's nest in a dense swamp
near a salt creek, and hatched the eggs with some others under a tame
duck.
Pages:
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67