SOLITARY SAISTDPIPER 3 



his cabin he noticed a bird fly to a low tamarack and enter a nest. It was 

 ostensibly one of the waders, and great was his surprise upon examining the 

 nest to find it the structure of a robin. It contained four beautiful eggs, 

 greenish white in ground color and heavily spotted and blotched with reddish 

 brown. Thus, on June 16, 1903, the first authentic eggs of the solitary sand- 

 piper were taken but it was not until a year later that the identity of the 

 bird was definitely established. It was indeed interesting, 20 years later, 

 to be shown the cabin and to view the original tree from which the eggs were 

 collected. Subsequent to the finding of this nest many others have been 

 located, the bird evidencing no particular choice of nest in which to deposit 

 its eggs, the list including those of the bronzed grackle, Brewer's blackbird, 

 cedar waxwing, kingbird, robin, and Canada jay. These have been found 

 at an elevation as low as 4 feet and as high as 40 and in locations contiguous 

 to water and as far away as 200 yards. 



Walter Raine (1904), for whom Mr. Thomson was collecting eggs 

 at the time, was the first to publish the important news, but he waited 

 a year until another nest was found and the parent bird shot. The 

 following year, 1904, Mr. Thomson found two more nests and shot 

 the parent bird from the last one. Mr. Eaine (1904) then published 

 a full account of all three nests, each of which contained four eggs. 

 The first nest, taken June 16, 1903, was " an old nest of the American 

 robin, built 15 feet up in a tamarack tree, that was growing in the 

 middle of a large muskeg, dotted with tamaracks." The second was 

 found on June 9, 1904, an old " nest of a bronzed grackle, built in 

 a low tree." The third set was taken on June 24, 1904, and the parent 

 bird was shot, as she flew from " the nest of a cedar waxwing, which 

 was built in a small spruce tree growing in a swamp, the nest being 

 about 5 feet from the water." Since then numerous other nests have 

 been found in similar situations, A. D, Henderson (1923) reported 

 a nest found in 1914, about a " dozen feet up in a poplar tree," and 

 on June 7, 1922, a set of eggs was taken for him, with the parent, 

 by a young friend : 



The nest was in a white birch tree, growing at the edge of the timber, on 

 the shore of a small lake, and about 150 yards from his home. A brood of 

 young robins had been raised in it last season, he told me. It was about 18 

 feet from the ground and a typical robin's nest, of grass and mud. The inside 

 lining of grass was gone and the eggs lay in the bare mud cup, no material 

 being added by the sandpiper, which I identified as the eastern form of the 

 bird. 



Mr. Henderson and Eichard C. Harlow took a set of four fresh 

 eggs on May 30, 1923, near Belvedere, Alberta, from an old robin's 

 nest 10 feet up in a scrubby spruce, 30 feet high, on the muskeg 

 border of a swampy lake. A nest found by Messrs. Street (1923) 

 and Stuart, near Ked Lodge, Alberta, on Ivlay 29, 1923, was also an 

 old robin's nest only 4 feet from the ground in an 8-foot spruce, in 

 a muskeg surrounded by spruces and tamaracks. 



