28 Union Bay 



winged teal were always among the first to get here and that 

 small migrating shorebirds came soon after if the lake level 

 were low enough to expose the flats where they fed. 



The returning birds and their young differed in many ways 

 from those I had seen in the spring. Their summer had been 

 filled with most of the things that can befall a bird. They 

 had paraded and displayed their finery on the breeding 

 grounds, had mated, built their nests, and tirelessly looked 

 after their young. They had been helpless against a predation 

 which had possibly taken half of their little brood. They had 

 trained the remainder in the ground ways of their kind, and 

 had prepared them for the return journey which must be 

 begun within a few weeks of their hatching. 



When the black-bellied plovers had passed through in 

 spring, they showed the impatience of salesmen waiting for 

 the next bus, but on this return trip they fed, warily and at a 

 distance, for a week before weather conditions sent them 

 on the leisurely way again. If the birds had operated by the 

 clock in spring, they now seemed governed by the calendar. 

 Their appearance was different, too. The color of the plum- 

 age was more sober and its freshness dimmed. The formal 

 black and white of spring had been replaced by an incon- 

 spicuous gray which transformed the dandy into a colorless 

 and dowdy plebeian. 



I watched these returning migrants with interest and, I 

 must confess, with some concern, for I knew the many haz- 

 ards of the remaining phase of their migration cycle. If all 

 went well they would complete their return trip without un- 

 due hardship, but many pages of records testified to the 

 dangers of these annual trips. I had seen ocean birds driven 

 far inland by storms and had found the bodies of many which 

 had perished, and I knew there was always the threat of 

 insufficient food supply, attacks by predator hawks and owls, 

 oil pollution, lead poisoning, caused by picking up shot in 

 gravel— a source of many fatalities in much-hunted areas 



