SH G5¥. 
SOME LAKE-SIDE 
THE NOR 
WADERS OF 
HWESD 
BY WEREERT K JOB 
PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE AUTHOR 
T was not so 
very long 
ago that 
when our migra- 
tory shore-birds 
and water-fowl 
departed on 
their northward 
r flight they with- 
drew into a 
realm of mys- 
tery, beyond 
reach and ob- 
servation of the 
naturalists who 
would gladly 
have learned 
theirsecrets. To 
one who makes 
: : no pretension of 
being as great a naturalist as Audubon 
it is ‘mightily interesting to read his biog- 
raphies of these birds. so mysterious to 
him, and feel just a bit elated in knowing 
more of some of them than he did, to have 
found nests which he never set eyes upon, 
and to have traversed regions which, with 
all his enthusiasm, he then found it impos- 
sible to penetrate. In his day the West and 
Northwest were practically inaccessible. 
He did at last manage to ascend the Mis- 
souri River by boat to the borders of our 
present Montana, after many weeks of toil 
and danger. But even then he could not 
wander back from the muddy river to the 
grass-girt prairie lakelets where the hordes 
of wild fowl nested. There was constant 
danger from Indians, and to study birds un- 
der military escort is not the most success- 
ful method. 
If only he could have struck eastward 
671 
from the upper Missouri for a few score 
miles and reached the lake region in what 
is now North Dakota, he could have filled 
many a gap in his material. There the wild 
geese and ducks nest even now and the 
elusive shore-birds rear their young. With 
a boat launched on the Minnewaukon, or 
“Spirit Water,” he might have been rea- 
sonably safe from the savages, for even to 
this day the Indians have a superstitious 
fear of paddling out on its waters; believing 
that the mysterious evil Spirit may destroy 
them. 
Along the gravelly margin of this large 
lake resort hosts of shore-birds in the season 
of migration; but for breeding purposes 
those which stay prefer the little grassy 
pools or sloughs which lie back on the 
prairie from the larger lakes. These are 
scattered all over the region, from the 
Dakotas, western Minnesota and eastern 
Montana, northward through Manitoba and 
Assiniboia, and up into the Saskatchewan 
country, the muskeg region, and the bar- 
ren grounds to the arctic sea. All this 
is the favorite summer home of multitudes 
of our swift-flying, mysterious shore-birds, 
or limicole, and the keen enthusiast who 
has long tried to become familiar with 
them can here find them in goodly numbers 
and study them at leisure. 
Most of the species go far to the north to 
those parts of their range which are as yet 
little known and quite inaccessible. The 
final weeding-out process in the southern 
part of this range comes promptly with the 
early days of June. I shall never forget 
the sight which | witnessed for a few hours 
one day in May in North Dakota on a 
little, shallow, muddy, alkaline pool of a 
few acres. Just back from the shore, in 
