140 HOMING WITH THE BIRDS 



liim there. As far as I could distinguish the bird 

 from his background he remained motionless. 



It would be impossible to make anyone who had 

 not seen this bird in the same location believe how 

 completely he became a part of his surroundings 

 when he threw himself into position. His bare, 

 slender feet and legs were greenish yellow exactly 

 like the grass-shaded water and the sands on which 

 he stood. His breast was striped in even bands, 

 almost exactly the width of the blades of marsh 

 grass, seeming as if it had been measured and 

 pencilled — one stripe precisely the yellowish tan of 

 last year's dead leaf, the next stripe the richer 

 brown of an older leaf having had longer exposure 

 to the weather. His eyes were rimmed with pale 

 yellow, with yellow rings around the iris, while 

 his upturned beak u^as almost too good to be true. 

 On his throat was the tan of the grasses, on his 

 head exactly their brown, while the large, sharply 

 pointed beak itself was striped with this tan 

 shading to brighter yellow, with the green of the 

 bulrushes, the paler tannish green of the cat- 

 tails faintly lined with a touch of dull red exactly 

 reproducing the rust-red effect of some of the 

 grasses, and the extreme tip of the beak was the 

 same old ivory as the dead outer leaves from which 

 this year's fresh cat-tails were springing. For the 

 remainder of that season I frecjuently hunted him 

 along this same stretch of lake shore, and while I 

 often saw him flying over the lake or alighting in 



