GAME BIRDS AND LARGER NON-GAME BIRDS 155 



Hills." But the advent of man and railroads spelled the 

 destruction of so fine and conspicuous a bird, and its nest 

 has not been found for a number of years. A few birds are 

 occasionally seen in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, and only 

 in the region between the Quill Lakes and Last Mountain 

 Lake in Saskatchewan do they appear to exist or breed in 

 any numbers. The little brown crane is often confused 

 with the sandhill crane, which is the well-known resident 

 brown crane of the prairies; the little brown crane, on the 

 other hand, is only a migrant within civilization and nests 

 in the far north. The sandhill crane is a rare migrant in 

 Ontario, and it is not common in British Columbia. But 

 in the Prairie Provinces and to the north the sandhill cranes 

 are fairly common, and one's eyes may still be gladdened 

 by the long Unes of these birds sailing through the sky. It 

 has been the custom to shoot these birds for food and to 

 regard them in certain locaUties as injurious to grain crops. 



SHORE-BIRDS, OR WADERS 



The shore-birds, or waders, have a special interest to 

 Canadians, as these birds, which migrate unusually long 

 distances, in most cases breed entirely and, in other cases, 

 principally within our territories, where suitable breeding- 

 grounds exist on a large scale. Large numbers breed in or 

 near Arctic Canada, and migrate to Central and South 

 America. The knot, one of the sandpipers found on our 

 Atlantic coast during the migration, breeds on the most 

 northern islands of the Arctic, such as Victoria and EUesmere 

 Islands, and, after migration along the Atlantic coast, win- 

 ters in Patagonia, a distance of over 9,000 miles separating 

 its summer and winter abodes. 



Formerly shore-birds of all kinds occurred on our coasts 

 and inland in countless numbers, but now some have prac- 

 tically disappeared, and even the species that have man- 

 aged to hold their own are far from abundant. No class of 



