RED-BACKED SANDPIPER 



A Day's Sport with the Red-backs and Greater Yellow-legs 



By VERDI BURTCH, Branchport, N. Y. 



With photographs by the Author 



OCTOBER had arrived with its reds, golds and browns; the day was 

 warm and mellow. It was the thirteenth of the month, and the most 

 of the birds had already passed on to the southward. The soft, muddy 

 shores of the marsh, where a month ago numbers of Solitary, Least, Semipal- 

 mated, and Pectoral Sandpipers, Yellow-legs, Killdeers, Semipalmated Plover, 

 Green Herons, Mourning Doves, Crackles, Cowbirds, Red-wings, Robins, and 

 a host of Song, Swamp, and Savannah Sparrows were feeding was now almost 

 deserted. Only in the early evening did it show signs of its former activity, 

 when the Red-wings, Cowbirds, and Crackles stopped there to get a lunch 

 before retiring to their roost in the cattails. But during the day only a few 

 Pectorals and Yellow-legs that had escaped the gunners were seen. 



It was much too nice a day to loaf around home, so, taking my Craflex, 

 I mounted my bicycle and rode two miles down the lake to a small marsh which 

 is cut off from the lake by a long gravelly bar. Earlier in the season this marsh 

 is very beautiful, with its great masses of yellow water-lilies and floating algae 

 all through the center, and sedges, cattails, great burr reed, sagittaria, sweet 

 flag, and water plantain reaching out from the shores into the shallow water. 

 But at this time the water was low, leaving wide, muddy shores which were 

 covered with the stranded algae and various water-weeds. 



As the shooting season was on and most of the shore-birds were gone, I 



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