The Snowy Plover 



Taken in Santa Barbara 



THE APPROACH 



Photo by the Author 



FEMALE SNOWY PLOVER STEALING FORWARD TO CLAIM EGGS. THE EGGS THEMSELVES ARE JUST IN FRONT OF THE BIRD, 



BUT OUT OF FOCUS 



dry nurse too. The sands are his gymnasium, circus, arena (to be exact). 

 Here it is he dries his clothes after a plunge, or takes a towel of sand in its 

 powdery warmth and, rising, shakes the dry liquid from him in prismatic 

 showers. Here he woos and battles, loses, triumphs, mourns, or otherwise 

 conducts the business of life. From the sands he wrests his meat and upon 

 the sands alone he couches his slumbering form. And on the sand he 

 dreams, for when the wind stirs up the sand, ah, then it is it whispers to 

 him of soft enchantments and of fairy banquetings. In these hurrying 

 particles a thousand diamonds flash and a million glasses tinkle, and the 

 piper feels himself some fairy regent in a heaven of his own. 



Snowy Plovers are resident upon our southern beaches. They are 

 not distributed along over the entire stretch of shoreline, but occur only 

 in most favored situations, usually those which are backed by sand dunes, 

 or which give easy access to a hinterland containing brackish lagoons 

 or a quiet-flowing river. In such places they assemble in colonies num- 

 bering from half a dozen to a score of pairs, and if the annual crop of 

 babies is a good one, one may see a hundred birds in August on a given 

 stretch of beach. The Plovers show no jealousy of other birds, and mingle 

 on occasion with such visitors as Sanderlings, Semipalmated Plovers, 

 and Killdeers, or with the lesser sandpipers. 



Some of their food is obtained at the water's edge or on the wet 

 sand, and some is taken on the saline flats which border the lagoons; 

 but more of it is found along the dry sand levels which lie above the 



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