118 EVERYDAY ADVENTURES 



intricate channels imaginable, and finally reached an 

 island hidden by shoals and salt-marshes, but whose 

 farther beach faced the ocean. There, in a space 

 about four hundred by one hundred feet, we found 

 seventy nests of tern, containing a hundred and 

 sixty-five eggs. Most of the nests contained two 

 eggs, some three, and one, four. The nests were 

 merely hollows in the sand, lined with bits of pure- 

 white shell. The usual color of the eggs was a blue- 

 green background, heavily blotched with chocolate 

 blotches, although I found one egg of a light green 

 speckled all over with light-red specks. In only one 

 nest was there a young bird. The little chick lay 

 flat in the burning sun, while overhead hung the 

 mother tern, pearl-white with black-tipped wings, 

 making a grinding, scolding note. The young tern 

 was downy like a duckling, and had tiny red feet 

 and a pink beak tipped with black. We put up a 

 stake to mark the nest, and later in the day, when 

 we came back to photograph it, we found that the 

 little tern had crawled out, followed the shadow 

 which the stick had made, and lay with its head in 

 the scanty shade far away from the nest. 



We met other rare water-fowl that blazing day. 

 We saw the rare piping plover, whose nest I was 

 afterwards to find in Upper Canada, black skimmers, 

 with their strange slant-cut beaks, black tern, least 

 tern, loons, black-bellied plover, and everywhere 

 throughout the salt-meadows enormous great-blue 

 herons. 



This was the last trip of our quartette for the 



