244 THE IMPORTANCE OF BIRD LIFE 



throngs. Thousands of stilts, avocets, and cur- 

 lews bred on the great marshes of California, and 

 the great prairies were the home of more curlews. 

 On the Atlantic shores the ocean beach appeared 

 alive with countless millions of tiny, restless san- 

 derlings, skirting the wave fringes on rapid tmn- 

 kling feet, filling their little bodies with the minute 

 Crustacea which burrowed there. Great flocks of 

 minute sandpipers ranged the salt marshes. Mud 

 flats were the feeding ground of thousands of wil- 

 lets, curlew, robin-snipe, dowitchers, and stilts. 

 And further inland the quiet of the fields was con- 

 tinually broken by the oft-repeated call of the 

 Bartramian sandpiper and the "kil-kill-d-e-e-r!" 

 of the killdeer plover. 



But those days have been relegated to the past. 

 Shorebirds have a nature too trusting for their 

 own best welfare ; they love too well the company 

 of their kind. Their calls are not difficult to imi- 

 tate; and these, arising from the lips of the con- 

 cealed hunter, together with the attractive array 

 of decoys he has arranged on the flat near his 

 blind, are sufficient to entice the unsuspecting 

 birds to their destruction. Nor do they -seem to 

 learn by experience to avoid gun-infested flats. 

 Some species will return again and again to the 

 wooden decoys, each time losing some of their 

 number by gun-fire, until perhaps the flock is ex- 

 terminated. Or, if excessively frightened the first 

 time, they will leave that flat and proceed on their 



