The Snowy Plover 
Taken in Santa Barbara 
THE APPROACH 
Photo by the A uthor 
FEMALE SNOWY PLOVER STEALING FORWARD TO CLAIM EGGS. THE EGGS THEMSELVES ARE JL'ST IN FRONT OF THE BIRD, 
BUT OUT (3F 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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