OCEANIC BIRD LIFE 227 



winged tern, with its long neck and slow, almost skua-like wing-strokes, 

 made several sham attacks on our heads from behind, diving so low that 

 we felt the beat of its wings. 



On our return journey from this peaceful little island we saw a few 

 frigate-birds soaring majestically aloft between the islands, and of course 

 we again kept a good look-out for crocodiles, though without seeing any. 



On Thursday Island itself, which is only a couple of kilometres across 

 at any part, I saw two old acquaintances from Europe, the common sand- 

 piper (Tringa hypoleucos) and the whimbrel (Numenius phcBopus). It 

 was homely among all these foreign birds to hear the sandpiper's soft 

 warning "Hee-dididee-ee hee-dididee-ee" and the rippling cry of the 

 whimbrel. Although later on I was to see and hear many familiar waders 

 of the northern hemisphere, I could never accustom myself to finding them 

 in such strange surroundings as the mangrove swamps and mud-flats of 

 New Guinea and the coral reefs and sandy shores of the Solomon Islands, 

 places where simultaneously one would hear the unmelodious cries of the 

 laughing jackass and gaudy parrots. All the northern waders which I 

 came across in the Tropics ■ — the turnstone (Arenaria inter pres), the 

 bar-tailed godwit (Limosa lapponica), the greenshank (Tringa nebula- 

 ria), the sandpiper, and the whimbrel — I had associated with a definite 

 Danish type of landscape at a definite season of the year, and so it was 

 strange to see them in what were their normal winter quarters. Most of 

 the birds were Arctic waders, probably from eastern Siberia, and at many 

 places along the south coast of New Guinea they were the predominant 

 birds on mud-flats and in mangrove swamps. Not all of these waders 

 stop in the Tropics: several species go on to South Australia and New 

 Zealand. The most southerly point at which I saw any of these northern 

 visitors was Dunedin in South Island, New Zealand, where I observed a 

 small flock of god wits. 



Along the south coast of New Guinea and eastward towards the Solo- 

 mon Islands and the Solomon Sea there were not so many sea-birds as in 

 the Indonesian region. But when passing the Louisiade Islands, which as 

 regards birds life are rather unknown, we saw more than at any other 

 single place in the Tropics. Here we observed several hundred frigate- 

 birds, several species of tern, and thousands of boobies, and for the first 

 time I saw the common noddy (Anous stolidus), which was the commonest 

 tern in the area. It would often be seen with brown-winged terns, a 

 few boobies, and shearwaters (Puffinus) in large mixed flocks of up to seve- 

 ral hundred individuals. The noddy, which is coal-black except for the 

 white forehead, differs from other terns in fishing like gulls; instead of 



