82 BIRDS OF THE DISTRICT OF GEELONG 
she will partly turn and go off in another course, 
and perhaps contrive, by an apparent disablement 
which may be produced by cunning or by sheer terror, 
to draw one's attention upon herself and away from 
her pretty spotted treasures. 
There is at the mouth of Bream Creek an immense 
" Blackfellow's kitchen-midden," as it is called, a 
bank upon which are myriads upon myriads of the 
broken shells of whelks, and their opercula, left 
there after the feasts of countless generations of 
aborigines. Here in the nesting-season you may see 
numbers of Dotterels running about or flying off with 
sharp single notes of alarm. The nests are not easy 
to discover at first in such surroundings, but two of 
us managed to find five in one afternoon. Young 
birds one does not often see : like all these Waders, 
they can run the moment they are out of the egg, 
and there seems to be hatched wath them an amazing 
aptitude for taking suitable cover. 
One notices the Red-capped Dotterel sparingly on 
the ocean beaches in the winter months, but I have 
never yet seen them in the vicinity of fresh water 
nor where there was no deposit of broken shell, 
although at the Salterns I once found them nesting 
not on the adjacent shelly banks, but on a patch of 
ground from which the samphire scrub had recently 
been cut away and burned ; the nest hollows were 
lined with tiny lengths of stick and twigs, and the 
eggs were splendidly protected by their similarity to 
their surroundings. 
