174 BULLETIN 142, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



meanings. When the female is with them (and you must sit watching for an 

 hour or more to observe this), the little ones are somewhat shy and take 

 refuge under her. If you make the slightest movement she flies up, uttering 

 the usual kirip, and kicks the young forwards, never backwards, until they 

 tumble head over heels 5 or 6 inches away. There they lie as if dead, but with 

 open eyes, and the mother flies around uttering a low tremulous kirip, kirip, 

 trip, trrrrrr, evidently meaning " lie quite still." Then she alights near the 

 young and runs about feigning lameness, while trying in every way to make 

 you attempt to capture her. If, however, you keep quite quiet she becomes 

 reassured, approaches near to where her young are, and utters with tender 

 modulations, day-day-day, day-day-day, which means evidently " all right, come 

 here." Then the chicks commence to chirp peep, peep, peeyp, and run to their 

 mother. On one occasion I observed all this at a distance of about 10 paces, 

 and once I was only about 3 paces from them. The downy young know their 

 mother's call day-day-day so well that on one occasion a young bird, which 

 I was taking home in my butterfly net, when it heard a female call quite 

 close to me, climbed out of the net to rejoin her. 



Mr. Brandt in his manuscript notes writes : 



The potential energy stored up in the small richly colored eggs of this north- 

 ern sandpiper is almost beyond comprehension. The downy chicks, as soon 

 as they are out of the shell, show wonderful activity. When they are but 

 30 minutes old, their apparently slight legs carry them over the ground with 

 great rapidity. They know at birth how to hide among the hummocks and 

 vegetation so as to defy the sharpest eyes. In three weeks they are awing 

 and six weeks later they are off on their long journey to the south, crossing 

 mighty mountain ridges, great stretches of land and of sea. 



According to W. H. Hudson (1920), the pectoral sandpiper arrives 

 in the La Plata region, in southern South America, about the end 

 of August, and he writes: 



Among these first comers there are some young birds, so immature, with 

 threads of yellow down still adhering to the feathers of the head, and altogether 

 weak in appearance, that one can scarcely credit the fact that so soon after 

 being hatched they have actually performed the stupendous journey from the 

 northern extremity of the North American continent to the Buenos-Ayrean 

 pampas. 



Plumages. — The young pectoral in down is a beauty and is distinc- 

 tively colored. The forehead, back to the eyes, lores, sides of the 

 head and neck, and the breast are from " cinnamon buff " to " cream 

 buff," paling to white or grayish w-hite on the throat and belly. There 

 is a broad, black, median stripe from the crown to the bill, a narrow, 

 black loral stripe, wdiich is joined by another, still narrower, malar 

 stripe under the eye, extending to the auriculars; below the ear is 

 a dark-brown spot. In the center of the crown is a black spot, sur- 

 rounded hj a circle of buffy white dots; around this the crown is a 

 mixture of black and "burnt sienna," bordered with buffy white, 

 except in front ; and around this border, or along each side of it, is a 

 narrow stripe of blackish brown above the buffy superciliary stripe. 

 The nape is grizzly brown, buff, and whitish. The back, wings, and 



