118 BIRDS OF THE WEST 



263. SPOTTED SANDPIPER called "Tip-up". Actitis macularia. 

 Seven and one half inches long. Brownish-olive above, white below 

 and spotted. The little fellows teeter up and down as they walk 

 about the edges of ponds searching for food. 



CURLEW. 



A few years ago when the food value of game birds appealed 

 more strongly to me than their aesthetic value, I was shooting 

 ducks on the lakes in the sandhills of Nebraska. As a curlew 

 flew over I took a long-distance shot at it and crippled it. Such 

 a cry as it gave I have never heard before nor since. It was 

 sach cries as that that caused the ancients to believe in the trans- 

 migration of souls. 



Presently curlews began to come from every direction and 

 to fly in a circle above me, setting up such a weeping and wail- 

 ing that I would have given my day of anticipated sport if I 

 could have raised the wounded bird to the air again. Shy and 

 wary almost beyond belief they seemed to lose their fear and 

 come to their wounded comrade with an appeal to take their lives 

 as well. 



What on earth can be done with a wounded bird? Can you 

 look it in the eye and wring its neck? A man who can do that is 

 fit for treason. And the echo of that cry! Twenty years has 

 not dulled it. 



An aquatic bird with bill adapted to fishing for small sea 

 food, it strangely comes in great numbers to spend the summer 

 in the loneliest part of the prairies, the sandhills of Nebraska 

 and the Bad Lands of Dakota. It seems to court solitude, to steal 

 from the rapture of the lonely shore to the pleasure of the path- 

 less prairies and the silence of the inland sand dunes. Surely 

 no bird is better suited to be the genius of solitary places. 



UPLAND PLOVER (BARTRAMIAN SANDPIPER). 



It seems almost like fate that a bird like the plover that 

 has done so much for man should be so rapidly passing. In the 

 grasshopper times no agency was so effective and none cost as 

 little. It was worth its weight in gold and I think that is the rea- 

 son that one variety is called the golden plover. Anyone who has 

 been in Dakota long, can remember when there was a plover on 



