THE RING-PLOVER. 117 



year round to the same localities, the beaches and flat shores of 

 the sea, particularly the banks in extensive creeks and bays ; 

 and along the estuaries of the larger rivers, in those places 

 especially where rivers from mountainous districts have been 

 long carrying on the work of attrition, have cut passages 

 through the strata, emptied mountain lakes, dispersed some 

 of the elementary part of the rocks in the air, reduced others 

 to clay, which, mingled with the remains of vegetation, has 

 become the rich soil of the lower vales and meadows, and 

 borne the silicious part to the confluence of the land tide 

 with the sea, there to remain in part as a bar between the 

 two, but to be thrown in greater part towards the shores, 

 and form accumulations of sand shingle, too little retentive 

 of moisture for growing almost any vegetable save bent. It 

 is of such places that the ring-plover is an appropriate inha- 

 bitant, though not the only one. Of running birds it is, 

 however, the appropriate and almost the only permanent 

 inhabitant of such places ; for it remains in them all the year 

 round, unless during those storms of more than ordinary vio- 

 lence, which literally pelt it from the shelterless beach and 

 force it inland ; and it quits not its pebbly or sandy ground 

 as long as the gull can keep wing above the tideway or the 

 petrel ride on the unbroken wave far at sea. 



The ring-plover is thus a bird of peculiar interest to the 

 British ornithologist, as marking as it were the boundary of 

 the sea and land, and remaining there in every state of the 

 weather in which man would be likely to go voluntarily to 

 notice it. 



It is a bird, to the form, size, and markings of which con- 

 siderable attention must be paid, inasmuch as there is not 

 only some confusion in its multiplicity of local names, a 

 confusion which is perhaps inseparable from a bird not rang- 

 ing over the island, but appearing only on the shores, at 

 places where the language and habits of the people are alike 



