WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD 



halt at the Bermudas, and some go right by, 

 passing with utter scorn of rest over the Antilles. 

 These are all long- winged, strong fliers, and prom- 

 inent among them is the golden plover, which is 

 world- wide in its distribution, and apparently afraid 

 of nothing. It breeds only in the marshy plains 

 within the arctic circle, unless possibly, as Mr. 

 W. H. Hudson suspects, there may be a breeding 

 colony on the antarctic continent, to which, with 

 certain other birds, it seems to resort every year 

 by way of Cape Horn and the Falkland Islands. 

 The great majority of those in Patagonia and Ar- 

 gentina, however, go all the way to Alaska and 

 Greenland each year to lay their eggs. Similarly 

 this plover returns annually from the Siberian 

 tundras to India, Ceylon, the coasts of China and 

 Malaya, and thence spreads over the East Indies 

 to New Zealand. Still more remarkable, how- 

 ever, is its performance in the northern Pacific 

 region, where every season it appears at the proper 

 time in Hawaii, the Ladrones, Fiji, Samoa, and 

 the other island groups of that vast ocean, none of 

 which is less than two thousand miles from the 

 nearest mainland and hardly less from each other. 

 It is not surprising to learn that when they arrive 

 at Hawaii in September the plovers are very poor 



114 



