TURNSTONE 281 



it down at the time as chetoah, clicicah, chewecJci, kUJcl-M kee Icee, and he sings 

 it con amore from any little mound." My first exi^erience with the turnstone 

 dates back to 1921, when with Mr. A. H. Paget Wilkes we found the nests of 

 some 19 pairs in Spitsbergen. It was then late in the breeding season; every 

 pair had incubated eggs or young, but directly one arrived within range of a 

 breeding pair the cock would fly out to meet us and greet us with his little 

 challenge song. As a rule attempts to describe the notes of birds by means of 

 letters are chiefly remarkable for their discrepancies, but if Mr. Paget Wilkes's 

 version of the " attack note " is compared with that of Mr. Trevor-Battye, the 

 resemblance is striking, tche-ivick . . . tsche-wick, tclie-wi-i-i-i-i-i-ck. Obviously 

 the two " songs " are the same, yet we heard this challenge daily from birds 

 far advanced in incubation and even with newly hatched young. It continued 

 as long as we remained in the neighborhood of the nest, and was sometimes 

 repeated in a weaker form by the female. When the young were being brooded 

 by the male and the female was on guard this challenge note was uttered by 

 her. There is, of course, a strong element of challenge in all bird song, and 

 the turnstone is a born flghter. No foe is too formidable to be attacked and 

 driven off. It is most amusing to see a male chasing a bird ten times as big 

 as himself and returning complacently to his sentry duty until the approach of 

 another probable enemy brings him again to the attack. 



There is Uttle doubt that all the " singing " males met with by Trevor-Battye 

 were really breeding birds defending the territories and, as they fondly 

 imagined, driving him away. Of course the cheery little chirrup of the turn- 

 stone has no claim to musical excellence in spite of Trevor-Battye's exaggerated 

 praise ; no one could possibly compare it to the sweet wild notes of the curlew 

 or even the flutelike notes of the purple sandpiper. Apparently in this species 

 the fighting instinct has replaced the tendency to display on the wing before 

 the female ; and while many other waders utter musical notes during the love 

 flight the turnstone reserves his for the attack. 



Nesting. — Comparatively few nests of the ruddy turnstone have 

 ever been found, as the bird nests in the far north, where few orni- 

 thologists have been. A set of three eggs in my collection, taken by 

 Capt. Joseph Bernard on Taylor Island, Victoria Land, on August 1, 

 1917, possibly a second laying, wag in a hollow on the tundra. Mac- 

 Farlane found only two sets on the lower Anderson Eiver, which 

 were precisely similar to those of the other waders, consisting of a 

 few withered leaves placed in a depression in the ground, each con- 

 taining four eggs. Eggs collected by Rev. A. R, Hoare at Point 

 Hope, Alaska, were laid " in depressions on mossy ridges of the 

 tundra." Herbert W. Brandt has sent me the following notes on 

 the nesting habits of these birds in Alaska : 



At Hooper Bay the ruddy turnstone like the indigenous plovers is an open- 

 nesting bird and it depends for concealment of its eggs upon the similarity of 

 the shell coloration to its surroundings. Near a limpid pool in the low-rolling 

 dunes the bird makes a shallow, circular depression in the brownish green, 

 velvetlike moss and this it lines, haphazardly, with a few moss stems and often 

 with small crisp leaves of low-creeping woody plants. The range of measure- 

 ments of five nests is: Inside diameter, 3% to 4^/4 inches; inside depth, 1 to 

 11/^ inches; and depth over all is 1 to 1% inches. The pied parents follow the 

 habits of the open-nesting birds, for they are wild and unapproachable while 



