away as the birds go to sleep, and quietness reigns unbroken, except 

 for the melodious songs of the old-squaws, or the occasional wild, 

 laughing cry of a loon. During the long twilight of these early 

 summer nights I often wandered for hours over the silent tundra 

 southeast of St. Michael, watching the sleeping birds on the number- 

 less ponds as well as on the open land. From 9 o'clock in the even- 

 ing until about 3 o'clock in the morning the sight of birds on the 

 wing was rare, except when occasionally straggling parties of Sabine's 

 gulls apj3eared. These exquisitely beautiful birds trailed silently 

 by, one by one, at all hours, their black heads and wing-borders con- 

 trasting with their snow-white bodies. Now and then an arctic tern 

 would pass, and more rarely still a wandering loon. 



The day's activity is usually begun in the morning by the clang- 

 ing cries of geese, quickly echoed by a medley of other bird-notes 

 from all directions. The bird-world becomes at once awake. Flocks 

 of ducks and geese move away to feeding-grounds, gulls and terns 

 circle and hover over ponds, cranes stalk solemnly about, and small 

 waders are busy everywhere. 



Asiatic Visitors to Alaska 



Alaska is separated from the nearest point of Asia at Bering 

 Strait by a distance of only about forty-eight miles. This nearness 

 makes it certain that various East-Asian birds will appear from time 

 to time within our borders, and, in fact, more than twenty species 

 of Old World birds have already been found in western Alaska ; 

 two of these, the Pacific golden plover and the bristle-thighed curlew, 

 winter on the southeastern coast of Asia or in the Polynesian Islands, 

 but breed in northeastern Siberia and on the Bering-Sea coast of 

 Alaska. The typical form of golden plover, familiar as a migrant in 

 the eastern United States, occupies only that part of Alaska from 

 Kotzebue Sound north, and the more richly golden form of the 

 Pacific replaces it to the southward of Bering Strait. The European 

 teal breeds throughout the Aleutian Islands, where it replaces the 

 green-winged teal of the mainland. The sharp-tailed sandpiper, a 

 beautiful species somewhat similar to the pectoral but much more 

 richly colored, swarms across from northeastern Siberia after the 

 breeding-season, and is very numerous along the Alaskan coast of 

 Bering Sea. The yellow wagtails, also, breed on this Alaskan coast 

 as well as in eastern Siberia, but in autumn all of the Alaskan 

 ones return to Asia for their southward migration. The beautiful 

 little spoon-billed sandpiper, the dotterel, the Mongolian plover, 

 Cassin's bullfinch, the Siberian red-spotted, blue-throated warbler, 



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