WILD WINGS 
248 
bv their position, on long, stilt-like legs, stood several birds of 
a kind I had never seen before in my life, another Southern 
loiterer, the Black-necked Stilt. How gracefully they waaed 
about, probing the muddy bottom for worms or mollusks with 
their long, sensitive bills! A hock of small migrating sand¬ 
pipers, probably the Semipalmated, were also feeding along 
the edge. 
Of course the terns’ nests were easily discovered, hollows 
in the sand, quite near together, usually containing two eggs. 
But it took considerable searching to locate four nests of the 
plover, now out on the sand, then in the shelter of a weedy 
clump or under the thin shade of the straggling mangroves. 
At the very outset we stumbled upon a nest of four eggs of 
the stilt, and presently found another with three. They were 
each in the sand back a little from the water, the hrst by the 
curious, spreading root of a red mangrove, the other near 
some weeds. The hollow in each case was prettily lined with 
bits of shell and a few weed-stems. I wish I could have 
stayed there alone to study and photograph these pretty 
life-scenes. The presence of a party of men talking and 
tramping around throws birds of such timid nature into 
a state of panic. One needs to be somewhat of a hermit in 
taste to get the most and best out of such surroundings. Yet 
we are social beings, and the thought of life alone on a lonely 
key in Barnes’s Sound, scores of miles from human aid, 
persecuted day and night by horrid swarms of venomous 
insects, is not altogether attractive. 
There is a class of shore-birds intermediate between the 
boreal and south-temperate extremes of their order. Though 
not reaching the far north, they yet penetrate within the 
Canadian boundary, and also breed far south, as well as 
at intermediate points; such are the Long-billed Curlew, 
the Great Marbled Godwit, the Bartramian Sandpiper or 
