CHAPTER IX 



BACKGROUND-PICTURING ON OBLITERATIVELY-SHADED BIRDS, CONTINUED. 

 BEACH-SAND- AND PEBBLE-PATTERNS OF THE SHORE BIRDS (Limicoke) . 

 GENERALIZATIONS AND COMPARISONS 



/^\BLITERATIVE shading, pure and simple, is the rule among the Shore 

 Birds (Limicolce). There are a few somewhat anomalous cases — 

 e. g., the summer costumes of the Golden and Black-bellied Plovers, and the 

 Dusky Redshank {Totanus fuliginosus), which we will consider later on; 

 but for the most part the birds of this order show great simplicity and uniform- 

 ity in their obliterative coloration. The markings of many of the species 

 which inhabit pebbly shores and wave-marked, sandy beaches are much like 

 those of the grass-pattern birds described in Chapter VII, but even simpler. 



Littoral flats, whether of sand or shingle, are for the most part characterized 

 by great monotony and blankness, being governed by few and simple laws, 

 and almost wholly wanting the complex element of vegetable life, with which 

 we have had mainly to deal in the foregoing chapters. Since the birds that 

 inhabit these beaches are almost all great wanderers, making long semi- 

 annual migrations, one would expect to find their patterns not only simple 

 but highly generalized, and varying little among the species. A comparison 

 of the more strictly littoral among the smaller shore birds will show that this is 

 actually the case. There are, indeed, two quite distinct types among them, 

 but almost all the species belong to one or the other of these two. The one 

 includes those which are largely destitute of picture-pattern — e. g., the smaller 

 plovers (Mgialitis), the other those which are well provided with such pat- 

 terns, of a regular and simple kind — e. g., many of the sandpipers (Tringa, 

 etc.). The patterns of sand and shingle and tidal mud flat are apt to be so 

 slight that a bird can be well concealed on such ground by counter shading 



14 -" 



