NONSUCH 



stuffed with the sand-hopping amphipods which 

 Hved in the seaweed, but the thing that interested 

 me most was the inorganic contents of the small 

 gizzards. One could always become emotional when 

 a tired migrant swung into view and landed on the 

 beach: One thought how the fluff of feathers had 

 fought wind and darkness and the ever-present 

 danger of the imminent waves for hundreds of miles 

 from the last take-oif to this speck of land in mid- 

 Atlantic. But when I tumbled the grit from the 

 gizzards out upon my microscope stage and fo- 

 cused upon it, and turned over the little particles 

 with my finger, I had made much more than a theo- 

 retical contact with the arctic homes of these birds. 

 In the turnstones and the least and semipalmated 

 sandpipers, mingled with the remains of the crus- 

 taceans I found tiny bits of stone — fair rocks 

 and boulders they looked under the lens; not the 

 ground-up shell and sand grains and comminuted 

 armor of crab and snail which compose the strand of 

 Bermuda, but rounded bits of granite and glassy 

 quartz, and red, pitted, hematite-like minerals, and 

 here and there, a bit rough and black like lava.- 

 From Melville Bay, northern Labrador, the Yu- 

 kon's mouth these came — and the scant six inches 

 of least sandpiper brought his from Ungava, Yaku- 

 tat Bay, Keewatin and perhaps the farthest point 

 of northwestern Alaska — four thousand miles and 

 more away. Here in my mid-Atlantic laboratory I 

 was fingering the very soil itself from these magic 

 lands of the north, brought to me in the bodies of the 



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