Testing a self-formed ecological hypothesis paid off with a lone migrating duck

Evidence

Like most aspiring hunters, I was given, at an early age, a single-barreled shotgun and permission to hunt rabbits. One winter Saturday, en route to my favorite rabbit patch, I noticed that the lake, then covered with ice and snow, had developed a small ‘airhole’ at a point where a windmill discharged warm water from the shore. All ducks had long since departed southward, but I then and there formulated my first ornithological hypothesis: if there were a duck left in the region, he (or she) would inevitably, sooner or later, drop in at this airhole. I suppressed my appetite for rabbits (then no mean feat), sat down in the cold smartweeds on the frozen mud, and waited. … I waited all afternoon, growing colder with each passing crow, and with each rheumatic groan of the laboring windmill. Finally, at sunset, a lone black duck came out of the west, and without even a preliminary circling of the airhole, set his wings and pitched downward. — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 430

Categorization

• XREF: The boy’s disciplined wait tests a hypothesis — a model of the attentive field observation championed by the land ethic and the Reading the Landscape course’s observation method.