104 Union Bay 



the stadium. The shafts sailed out in a long flight and quiv- 

 ered as they struck. The distances seemed great though I 

 was too far away to judge adequately. One shaft pierced the 

 sod in a location which I recognized, so that, without think- 

 ing, I said: 



"That javelin landed just where we found the young kill- 

 deers last year." 



"Where you found what?" asked my companion. 



"Oh, some birds." I did not explain further. 



In the quiet that followed I thought of the young killdeers. 

 The old birds had built a nest the year before at the foot of 

 one of the posts which stood close to the track used for the 

 distance runs. A shallow depression held four spotted eggs, 

 and for two weeks the birds had feigned distress or cried in 

 anger so vociferously that almost all of the hundreds who 

 passed knew of the existence of the eggs. Nobody molested 

 them. I was asked to photograph the new arrivals in the nest 

 but their stay, as is usual with killdeers, was so short that 

 they had left before we reached the spot. Knowing that they 

 would not be far away, we searched the field, a quest which 

 would have been in vain had the old birds refrained from 

 swooping down each time we got warm. Finally the boy 

 with me found them, tiny bundles of brown and white down 

 with stout legs and enormous dark-colorepl feet. We put them 

 side by side and took pictures. From time to time they 

 uttered their thin peeps so loudly that the old birds circled 

 and berated us. Thinking that the young would shdw better 

 on a lighter background than on sod, I placed them on my 

 handkerchief, a practice which invariably gets me in trouble 

 at home, for the resulting stains are not calculated to make a 

 laundress happy. Before we had walked ten yards after 

 finishing the pictures the old birds had rejoined the young 

 and all was serene again. It was well that the killdeers were 

 not there while the javelins were flying, for a score of them 

 struck within a small spot close to the scene of our discovery. 



