52 BIRD HAUNTS AND NATURE MEMORIES 



dozed; others attended to their plumage, but whether 

 awake or, apparently, asleep, they hopped nearer and 

 nearer as the water pushed them up the sloping rocks. 

 The ringed plovers did not pack with the dunlins, but 

 ran in the shallow water, snapping up the tiny shrimp- 

 like crustaceans which came ashore with every ripple. 

 Sanderlings, already in grey winter garments, came to 

 join the throng, for the love of companionship is strong 

 in small waders; the Deeside fisherman classes all three, 

 and any strangers such as stints, as "little birds"; 

 they are hardly worth powder and shot, unless he can 

 rake a crowd and pick the victims up by the dozen. 



A few yards away, on the red rock, a single knot, grey- 

 backed, black-billed and olive-legged, dozed uncon- 

 cernedly, and soon some fifty or sixty of these inhabitants 

 of the Far North, breeders in Greenland or the little known 

 Taimyr, swept past, followed immediately by many 

 hundreds, which, after a sharp swing, dropped on the 

 sand, each in alighting holding its pointed wings erect 

 for a noticeable interval. They crowded, as they always 

 do, and ran, a little grey cloud on the ruddy sand, calling 

 a chorus of sharp notes, knut, knut. Fanciful writers 

 connected the bird which wades and runs back before 

 the advancing waves with the tradition of Canute, but the 

 longshore man, who named the bird before Linnaeus 

 invented canutus, knew more about its voice than such 

 writers as Camden and Drayton, and perhaps had never 

 heard of King Canute. 



The little birds were soon joined by a motley band, for 

 variation in age and season makes the turnstone a harle- 

 quin in dress; happy the man who first names them 

 " tortoiseshell plovers." There was no weed on the rocks 

 to be thrown over, no pebbles to be turned, so the little 

 party rested at the edge of a sandstone ridge. With 

 them were one or two purple sandpipers, stout little 



