A Man May Be Some Duck's Mother

In his reports, written and oral, Albert Hochbaum of Delta deals usually with the advances of research. But Hochbaum is both a technician and a hunter, and in one address he had this to say: "My grandfather, native of Chicago, did his wildfowling on the great Kankakee Marsh of Illinois—as fine a place surely as the Delta and Libau marshes. When my grandfather told me of the Kankakee, his arms would spread wide, and he would hesitate again and again as he searched for words to describe the wonder of the place. He could try to tell me of Kankakee, but he could not show me, for it had long since been destroyed.... It used to be that part of the sport was getting there. Now the cars crowd to the very edge of the good marshes, where the litter of careless hunters gives this border of wild country, this rim of adventure, the aspect of a vacant lot near the city dump.... When we have used this Manitoba marsh so badly," Hochbaum concluded, "that our companion species have lost their hold, then it will be time to wonder how much longer we ourselves may stay."