WATCHING RINGED PLOVERS, ETC. 31 



it as it passes, sometimes beneath, alighting again 

 immediately afterwards. This may continue for 

 some little time, the one bird passing backwards and 

 forwards over or under the other as long as he is 

 received in the same way. Gradually, however, these 

 little sorties against him from being at first hardly 

 more than balloon-jumps — springs with aid of wings 

 — become more and more prolonged, and extended 

 outwards into his own radius of flight. The bird 

 making them no longer alights in the same or nearly 

 the same place as where he went up, but farther 

 and farther away from it, the figure is lost, or becomes 

 indistinct, " as water is in water," till at last the two 

 are flying and chasing each other again. 



This upward sweep from near the ground — some- 

 times from nearly touching it — with its attendant 

 sweep back again, is one of the greatest beauties of 

 the peewit's flight — a flight that is full of beauties. 

 He does it often, but not always in quite the same way ; 

 it is a varying perfection, for each time it is perfect, 

 and sometimes it seems to vie with almost any aerial 

 master-stroke. The bird's wings, as it shoots aloft, 

 are spread half open, and remain thus without being 

 moved at all. The body is turned sideways — some- 

 times more, sometimes less — and the light glancing 

 on the pure soft white of the under part, makes it 

 look like the crest of foam on an invisible and 

 swiftly-moving wave. As the uprush attains its 

 zenith, there is a lovely, soft, effortless curling over 

 of the body, and the foam sinks again with the wave. 

 Such motions are not flight, they are passive aban- 

 donings and givings-up-to, driftings on unseen cur- 

 rents, bird-swirls and feathered eddies in the thin 



