UPLAND PLOVER 179 



came to us from the sky — the weird laughter-like 

 cry of rails, the shrill confused whistling of a great 

 flock of whistling or tree duck; and, most frequent 

 of all, the beautiful wild trisyllabic alarm cry of 

 the upland plover. 



Of this bird, the last on my list for this chapter, 

 I must write at greater length; in the first place, for 

 the purely sentimental reason that it was the one 

 I loved best, and, secondly, on account of the leading 

 place it came to occupy in my mind when I thought 

 about the problem of migration. It inhabits, or 

 formerly inhabited, a great portion of the United 

 States of North America, its summer or breeding 

 home, then migrated south all the way to southern 

 Argentina and Patagonia, and it was, I believe, most 

 abundant on the great level pampas where I had 

 my home. In North America it is known as the 

 upland plover, and is also called the solitary plover 

 and Bartram's sandpiper — for a sandpiper it is, albeit 

 with the habits of a plover and a preference for dry 

 lands. In the Argentine its vernacular name is 

 Batitu, from its trisyllabic alarm note — one of the 

 most frequently heard sounds on the pampas. It is 

 a charming bird, white and grey with brown and 

 yellow mottlings on its upper plumage, beautiful in 

 its slender graceful form, with a long tail and long 

 swallow-like pointed wings. All its motions are ex- 

 ceedingly graceful: it runs rapidly as a corncrake 

 before the rider's horse, then springs up with its 

 wild musical cry to fly but twenty or thirty yards 

 away and drop down again, to stand in a startled 



