Snipe, Sandpipers, etc. 



practice, to name the multitudinous sandpipers on sight, since 

 their plumage, never bold or striking, often differs greatly with 

 age and season, making the task even more difficult than that of 

 correctly naming every warbler. But the long, decurved bill of 

 this sandpiper offers the surest clue to its identity at any time. 



With this bill the sand worms are dragged forth from their 

 holes and the tiny shell fish from the depths in which they have 

 buried themselves at low tide. It appears to be quite as sensitive 

 in feeling after food as a snipe's. Or it will be used to pick 

 morsels from the surface and to seize insects on the wing in the 

 salt meadows. Usually these sandpipers keep close together in 

 their feeding grounds and during flight, offering all too tempting 

 a chance for a pot shot. Because they are unsuspicious from 

 passing so much of their lives in Arctic desolation, unmolested 

 by men, dogs, and guns, their gentle confidence passes for stupid- 

 ity here. Is it through stupidity or some higher trait that the 

 survivors of a fiock, just raked by a bayman, return immediately, 

 after a hurried, startled whirl, to the spot where their companions 

 lie dead or wounded and helpless, calling forth a pity in them 

 not shared by the man behind the gun, who, with another dis- 

 charge, rakes the survivors ? One inveterate old reprobate on 

 Long Island proudly exhibited over fifty of these and pectoral 

 sandpipers that had been feeding with them, as victims of only 

 three shots. 



In the spring, when lively impulses move all birds to in- 

 teresting performances, these dunlins, as our English cousins call 

 them, go through some beautiful wing manoeuvres calculated to 

 inspire admiration in the speckled breast of the well beloved. 

 "As the lover's suit approaches its end," to cite an author quoted 

 by Mr. D. G. Elliot, "the handsome suitor becomes exalted, and 

 in his moments of excitement he rises fifteen or twenty yards, and 

 hovering on tremulous wings over the object of his passion, pours 

 forth a perfect gush of music until he glides back to earth ex- 

 hausted, but ready to repeat the effort a few minutes later. 

 Murdoch says their rolling call is heard all over the tundra every 

 day in June, and reminds one of the notes of the frogs in New 

 England in spring." Up at the far north, where the love making 

 and nesting are commenced by the first day of summer — for the 

 birds make a very short stay here in spring — the males utter "a 

 musical trilling note, which falls upon the ear like the mellow 



218 



