232 
WILD WINGS 
had settled down upon her eggs, this time side to the camera. 
A steady ])ull on the string gave me a splendid timed expos¬ 
ure, the bird not moving at the click of the shutter. Alter 
being flushed again she would not return for a while, but 
I hnally got two more pictures before a shower started us 
back for the boat, myself delighted that I had succeeded, 
probably for the hrst time in history, in photographing Wil¬ 
son’s Snipe from life. Episodes like this are what, to my 
mind, make camera-hunting the finest of all sports. There 
are still many birds and mammals which have never yet 
been photographed. But even when a species, as such, 
has been photographed, there is well-nigh as great a held 
remaining as in human portraiture after the hrst man had 
been successfully photographed! 
In 1900, during a boating-trip to these islands, I happened 
upon a locality where, along with Piping Plovers and Spotted 
Sandpipers, there was quite a colony of Ring-necked Plovers, 
evidently breeding. These plovers, so common upon our Hats 
and beaches during the migrations, breed, usually, in the 
arctic regions, but here they were, at the southern limit of 
their range. Two parallel sand-bars connecting two “ islands ” 
here form between them a natural canal or lagoon over a mile 
in width, with sandy shores, and grassy dunes between these 
and the outer sea-beaches. The plover-ground was on the 
eastern shore of this lagoon. Numbers of the pretty plovers 
kept trotting along the sand in front of us, evidently anxious 
about their nests or young. These, unfortunately, we were 
unable to discover, owing to lack of time to prosecute the 
search. The fact of seeing a young Piping Plover led me to 
believe that the more northerly species also had young. 
I'pon my recent return to the Magdalens, I made it a point 
to devote a whole day to this localitv. It was the very same 
time of year as before, the twentieth of June, clear, and almost 
