232 WILD WINGS 



had settled down upon her eggs, this time side to the camera. 

 A steady pull on the string gave me a splendid timed expos- 

 ure, the bird not moving at the click of the shutter. After 

 being flushed again she would not return for a while, but 

 I finally got two more pictures before a shower started us 

 back for the boat, myself delighted that I had succeeded, 

 probably for the first time in history, in photographing Wil- 

 son's Snipe from life. Episodes like this are what, to my 

 mind, make camera-hunting the finest of all sports. There 

 are still many birds and mammals which have never yet 

 been photographed. But even when a species, as such, 

 has been photographed, there is well-nigh as great a field 

 remaining as in human portraiture after the first man had 

 been successfully photographed ! 



In 1900, during a boating-trip to these islands, I happened 

 upon a locality where, along with Piping Plovers and Spotted 

 Sandpipers, there was quite a colony of Ring-necked Plovers, 

 evidently breeding. These plovers, so common upon our flats 

 and beaches during the migrations, breed, usually, in the 

 arctic regions, but here they were, at the southern limit of 

 their range. Two parallel sand-bars connecting two " islands " 

 here form between them a natural canal or lagoon over a mile 

 in width, with sandy shores, and grassy dunes between these 

 and the outer sea-beaches. The plover-ground was on the 

 eastern shore of this lagoon. Numbers of the pretty plovers 

 kept trotting along the sand in front of us, evidently anxious 

 about their nests or young. These, unfortunately, we were 

 unable to discover, owing to lack of time to prosecute the 

 search. The fact of seeing a young Piping Plover led me to 

 believe that the more northerly species also had young. 



Upon my recent return to the Magdalens, I made it a point 

 to devote a whole day to this locality. It was the very same 

 time of year as before, the twentieth of June, clear, and almost 



