172 HISTORY OF THE 



and the tail banging almost directly down. As it thus flies it 

 utters a succession of the hollow, booming notes, which have a 

 strange ventriloquial quality. At times the male rises twenty 

 or thirty yards in the air, and, inflating its throat, glides down 

 to the ground with its sac hanging below, as is shown in the ac- 

 companying plate. Again he crosses back and forth in front 

 of the female, puffing his breast out and blowing from side to 

 side, running here and there, as if intoxicated with passion. 

 Whenever he pursues his love making, his rather low but per- 

 vadintr note swells and dies in musical cadences, which form a 

 striking part of the great bird chorus heard at this season in the 

 north." 



Mr. Murdock, to whom we are indebted for the first account 

 of its nest and eggs, says the birds breed in abundance at Point 

 Barrow, Alaska, and that "The nest is always built in the grass, 

 with a decided preference for high and dry localities like the 

 banks of gullies and streams. It was sometimes placed at the 

 edge of a small pool, but always in grass and in a dry place, 

 never in the black clay and moss, like the Plover and Buff- 

 breasted Sandpipers, or in the marsh, like the Phalaropes. The 

 nest was like that of the other waders, a depression in the 

 ground lined with a little dry grass." 



All the complete sets of eggs we found contained four. The 

 following is a description of the eggs, obtained from the exam- 

 ination of eighteen sets: 



They are pointedly pyriform, like those of the other small 

 waders. The following measurements, in inches, indicate the 

 size, shape and limits of variation: 1.58x1.06, 1.44x1.11, 1.42 

 xl.08, 1.54x1.02. In color and markings they closely resemble 

 the eggs of the other small waders. The ground color is drab, 

 sometimes with a greenish tinge, though never so green as in 

 the eg^ of P. alpina americana^ and sometimes a pale bistre 

 brown. The markings are blotchings of clear umber brown, 

 varying in intensity, thickest and sometimes confluent around the 

 larger end, smaller and more scattered at the smaller end. 

 Some of the eggs with brown ground are thickly blotched all 

 over. A single eg^ in one set of four has the markings almost 



