In the spring and summer we often visited the lagoons or marshes, the
most fascinating places I knew on account of their abundant wild bird
life. There were four of these lagoons, all in different directions
and all within two or three miles from home. They were shallow
lakelets, called _lagunas,_ each occupying an area of three or four
hundred acres, with some open water and the rest overgrown with bright
green sedges in dense beds, called _pajonales,_ and immense beds of
bulrushes, called _juncales._ These last were always the best to
explore when the water was not deeper than the saddle-girth, and where
the round dark polished stems, crowned with their bright brown tufts,
were higher than our heads when we urged our horses through them.
These were the breeding-places of some small birds that had their
beautifully-made nests a couple of feet or so above the water,
attached in some cases to single, in others to two or three, rush
stems. And here, too, we found the nests of several large species--
egret, night-heron, cormorant, and occasionally a hawk--birds which
build on trees in forest districts, but here on the treeless region of
the pampas they made their nests among the rushes. The fourth lakelet
had no rush-or sedge-beds and no reeds, and was almost covered with a
luxuriant growth of the floating _camalote,_ a plant which at a
distance resembles the wild musk or mimulus in its masses of bright
green leaves and brilliant yellow blossoms.
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