EIGHTH ANNUAL REPORT. 169 
swooped fearlessly toward us. Despite our painstaking search 
we could not discover their secret, and we hope that any enemy 
may have been as unsuccessful. During this season the Willets 
feed principally on worms and insects. 
14. Solitary Sandpiper (Helodromas solitarius, Wils.). I 
noticed two specimens feeding on the mud flats. This is an early 
date for this bird, as it nests north of the United States. 
15. Yellow-Legs (Totanus flavipes, Gmel.). Like the curlew, 
the small flocks of Yellow-Legs were the advance guard of the 
thousands of their kin which would soon poe from the north 
and pass southward. 
16. Clapper Rail or Marsh Hen (Rallus crepitans, Gmel.). 
This is the most characteristic breeding bird of the marshes on 
and near Cobb Island. It is very wary and secretive, and seldom 
allows itself to be seen, but its reiterated calls combined with the 
remarkable ventriloquial power with which they are uttered, 
makes it seem as if every bunch of grass hid one or more of these 
birds. They are very abundant on the island, and without par- 
ticular search we found several of their nests. The young birds 
had left in most cases, and two sets of eggs of seven and nine re- 
spectively, were almost ready to hatch. A wooden causeway 
built on piles connected the main building of the Life-Saving Sta- 
tion with the ocean side, and just about two feet to the right of 
this, half-way across the island, a Clapper Rail had built her 
nest. Several times we crept up and watched her leave her eggs 
—a small brown form which swiftly and silently threaded the 
reeds without touching the water. 
On June twenty-third and twenty-fourth unusually high tides 
had destroyed the nests of hundreds of these birds, and their 
eggs were washed up along the shore in windrows. The nests 
which we found in the low marshes had all been built since that 
time and showed a remarkable provision against a repetition of 
such a disaster. The nests on the higher dunes were merely a 
rough collection of reeds upon the ground, while the nests in the 
flooded portions of the island, although rebuilt at almost the ex- 
act location of the old nests, were woven between supporting 
reeds some eighteen inches higher, the old flattened nests form- 
ing a rough platform at one side and below the new structures, 
and used by the rails as resting places in leaving or returning to 
the eggs. 
The rails feed on small crabs and insects, and they certainly 
cannot lack for food. If anyone has ever stood barefooted in 
the waters of a Cobb Island marsh photographing the nest of one 
