BIRD NOTES AFIELD 



flashing their white breasts in the sun in the course of their 

 graceful evolutions. Curlews walk about in the shallow water 

 with their long, slender, unwieldy beaks seemingly very much 

 in the way. Now a gull flaps calmly overhead, a duck whirs 

 past with rapid wing-strokes, and away off on the water we 

 see a line of black-bodied cormorants lumbering over the sur- 

 face of the tide. 



It is time to inspect some of the birds about us with more 

 care. What is that queer, ungainly form skulking in the 

 marsh-grass? It is a bird about the size of a bantam hen, but 

 with a longer neck, with slender bill and legs, and a body 

 curiously compressed sidewise. It is elusive, running away 

 into the tangle of swamp weeds and baffling pursuit. Patience 

 enables us to get a good, clear view of the creature, and we 

 feel certain that the California clapper-rail must be unique 

 among birds, so different is he from any feathered creature 

 we have ever seen before. His lank figure and furtive manner 

 stamp him at once as an unsocial, suspicious creature, and I 

 dare say he has had good reason to become so. His back is 

 somewhat streaked and varied in olive-brown and ashen 

 shades, and his breast is plain cinnamon in color, with dusky 

 bars on the grayish flanks. In the springtime the rails breed 

 in these same marshes where they winter, laying some eight 

 or ten eggs of a buff color, spotted with brown, the nest con- 

 sisting of a few dried tules, depressed in the center and well 

 hidden among the surrounding weeds. 



Just back of the marsh-grass are little muddy pools, flooded 

 only at very high tide, and now left to the kildeer plovers. 

 They are noisy fellows, repeatedly uttering their loud, shrill, 

 though unmusical cry — kH^-deef kill-dee! The kildeer is a 



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