Penobscot Bay, Maine.
1896
June 30
(No 4)
the island near the edge of the bank above the shingle. It contained
a single egg, bright & clean-looking. Of course we left it
undisturbed. The nest was in a bed of tall, dense grass & apparently
some kind of cultivated grass.
  During our stay on the island we saw nothing of the Mergansers
themselves until after 4 P.M. when first four, then two, & finally
a single bird flew past along the shore & out over the sea
again. Conary considers them to be when breeding the slyest
wariest birds he has ever met with. Twice only has he flushed
the bird from her eggs. Almost invariably she takes the alarm
long before the boat anchors and in some way manages to
slip off unseen. But how can a bird sitting under a dense
mat of lodged vegetation out of sight of the water so this!
I can think of only one way viz. that the drake keeps
watch & warns his mate of the danger when the approaching
sail is a mile or more away.
  There were probably 200 pairs of Terns breeding on this island.
I shot one Arctic Tern and by the aid of my glass positively
identified a number of others but as nearly as I could make 
out they did not represent more than 10% of the total
number of birds which we saw. Where within 100 yards & not
directly overhead it was rather easy with the glass to
distinguish them from the Common Tern by their wholly red
bills and long tails I identified only one of their notes. It 
corresponds with & is similar to the te-ar-r of S. hirundo but
is more gutteral & raucus. The Arctic Terns seemed to be
nesting only along the sand & shingle of the beaches where their
numbers were apparently about equal to those of the Wilson's Tern.
Inland on the dry flat & grassy hill top we saw only the
latter species and all of the hundred or more eggs that we found