away as the birds go to sleep, and quietness reigns unbroken, except 
for the melodious songs of the old-squaws, or the occasional wild, 
laughing cry of a loon. During the long twilight of these early 
summer nights I often wandered for hours over the silent tundra 
southeast of St. Michael, watching the sleeping birds on the number¬ 
less ponds as well as on the open land. From 9 o’clock in the even¬ 
ing until about 3 o’clock in the morning the sight of birds on the 
wing was rare, except when occasionally straggling parties of Sabine’s 
gulls appeared. These exquisitely beautiful birds trailed silently 
by, one by one, at all hours, their black heads and wing-borders con¬ 
trasting with their snow-white bodies. Now and then an arctic tern 
would pass, and more rarely still a wandering loon. 
The day’s activity is usually begun in the morning by the clang¬ 
ing cries of geese, quickly echoed by a medley of other bird-notes 
from all directions. The bird-world becomes at once awake. Flocks 
of ducks and geese move away to feeding-grounds, gulls and terns 
circle and hover over ponds, ci'anes stalk solemnly about, and small 
waders are busy everywhere. 
Asiatic Visitors to Alaska 
Alaska is separated from the nearest point of Asia at Bering 
Strait by a distance of only about forty-eight miles. This nearness 
makes it certain that various East-Asian birds will appear from time 
to time within our borders, and, in fact, more than twenty species 
of Old World birds have already been found in western Alaska; 
two of these, the Pacific golden plover and the bristle-thighed curlew, 
winter on the southeastern coast of Asia or in the Polynesian Islands, 
but breed in northeastern Siberia and on the Bering-Sea coast of 
Alaska. The typical form of golden plover, familiar as a migrant in 
the eastern United States, occupies only that part of Alaska from 
Kotzebue Sound north, and the more richly golden form of the 
Pacific replaces it to the southward of Bering Strait. The European 
teal breeds throughout the Aleutian Islands, where it replaces the 
green-winged teal of the mainland. The sharp-tailed sandpiper, a 
beautiful species somewhat similar to the pectoral but much more 
richly colored, swarms across from northeastern Siberia after the 
breeding-season, and is very numerous along the Alaskan coast of 
Bering Sea. The yellow wagtails, also, breed on this Alaskan coast 
as well as in eastern Siberia, but in autumn all of the Alaskan 
ones return to Asia for their southward migration. The beautiful 
little spoon-billed sandpiper, the dotterel, the Mongolian plover, 
Cassin’s bullfinch, the Siberian red-spotted, blue-throated warbler. 
27 
