I 20 
THE CONDOR 
VOL. VI 
stone. The journey of the plover, which is typical, is wonderful enough to be 
given in detail. In the first week of June they arrive at their breeding grounds in 
the bleak, wdnd-swept “barren grounds” above the Arctic Circle, far beyond the 
tree line. Some even venture i,ooo miles farther north (Greely found them at 
latitude 8i°). While the lakes are still icebound, they hurriedly fashion shabby 
little nests in the moss only a few inches above the frozen ground. By August 
they have hastened to Labrador, where, in company with curlews and turnstones, 
they enjoy a feast. Growing over the rocks and treeless slopes of this inhospit- 
able coast is a kind of heather, the crowberry, bearing in profusion a juicy black 
fruit. The extravagant fondness shown for the berry by the birds, among which 
the curlew, owing to its greater numbers, is most conspicuous, causes it to be 
known by the natives as the “curlew berry.” The whole body of the curlew be- 
comes so saturated with the dark, purple juice that birds whose flesh was still 
stained with the color have been shot i,ooo miles south of Labrador. 
After a few weeks of such feasting, the plovers become excessively fat and 
ready tor their great flight. They have reared their young under the midnight 
sun, and now they seek the Southern Hemisphere. After gaining the coast of 
Nova Scotia they strike straight out to sea, and take a direct course for the east- 
ernmost Islands of the West Indies. Eighteen hundred miles of ocean waste lie 
between the last land of Nova Scotia and the first of the Antilles, and yet 600 more 
to the eastern mainland of South America, their objective point. The only land 
along the route is the Bermuda Islands, 800 miles from Nova Scotia. In fair 
weather the birds fly past the Bermudas without stopping; indeed they are often 
seen by vessels 400 miles or more east of these islands. When they sight the first 
land of the Antilles the flocks often do not pause, but keep on to the larger islands 
and sometimes even to the mainland of South America. Sometimes a storm drives 
them off the main track, when they seek the nearest land, appearing not infre- 
([uently at Cape Cod and Long Island. 
A few short stops may be made in the main flight, for the plover swims lightly 
and easily and has been seen resting on the surface of the ocean; and shore birds 
have been found busily feeding 500 miles south of Bermuda and 1,000 east of Flor- 
ida, in the Atlantic, in that area known as the Sargasso Sea, where thousands of 
s([uare miles of sea weed teem with marine life. 
Though feathered balls of fat when they leave Labrador and still plump when 
they pass the Bermudas, the plovers alight lean and hungry in the Antilles. Only 
the first, though the hardest, half of the journey is over. How many days it has 
occupied may never be known. Most migrants either fly at night and rest in the 
day or vice versa, but the plover flies both night and day. 
After a short stop of three or four weeks in the Antilles on the northeastern 
coast of South America, the flocks disappear, and later their arrival is noted at 
the same time in southern Brazil and the whole Prairie region of Argentina 
almost to Patagonia. Here they remain from September to March (the summer of 
the Southern Hemisphere), free from the responsibilities of the Northern summer 
they have left. The native birds of Argentina are at the time engrossed in fam- 
ily cares; but no wayfarer from the north nests in the south. 
After a six-months’ vacation the plovers resume the serious affairs of life and 
start back toward the Arctic, but not by the same course. Their full northward 
route is a problem still unsolved. They disappear from Argentina and shun the 
whole Atlantic coast from Brazil to Labrador. In March they appear in Guate- 
mala and Texas. April finds their long lines trailing across the prairies of the 
Mississippi Valley; the fir.st of May .sees them crossing our northern boundary; 
