112 MUTTON BIRDS 



minute leave tlie nest, always returning, 

 liowever, and again settling on to the eggs. 

 Thus during that day and other days we 

 worked up to a distance sufficiently near for a 

 passable picture. Eventually, by piling rocks 

 on the camera legs, weighting it above with a 

 huge granite flake, anchoring it again from the 

 tripod, and by both of us standing on the wind- 

 ward side, in a comparative lull of this six days' 

 gale, we got the photographs shewn. 



The owner of the second nest discovered had 

 apparently lost her mate ; at any rate, I was by 

 the sitting bird on one occasion for over seven 

 hours and neither saw nor heard a Dotterel in 

 the vicinity, — in fact I never saw or heard, 

 morning, noon, or late evening, a second bird 

 on the hill. This Dotterel on the sand ridge was 

 moreover lame in one foot and running on little 

 more than a stump. The diseased or injured 

 claw was almost gone, and seemed to have 

 been withered and drawn up into a knot. 



The New Zealand Dotterel, like the Ground 

 Lark, is liable to diseases of the foot; for 

 another bird on the beach was also suffering 

 from a shrivelled foot very much like that of 

 my friend of the granite hill. 



On the seventh day, when the gale was over, 

 and a deluge of rain had set in, from the east, 

 I noticed, too, that she had, as if furious wuth 

 hunger and using abnormal methods, dee]3ly 

 probed the wet hard-set sand within an inch or 

 two of her nest. Only starvation, I believe, 

 could have induced any bird to behave thus. 



Near the nest even the faintest signs that 

 invite attention are eschewed, the ])ird itself as 

 far as possible avoiding the neighbourhood. 



