14 THE A UsDU BION “BUD DEsieies 
wild voice!) and the plaintive warble of the screech owl? The rabbit 
browsing through the woods stops, stomps and listens. The horned owl, 
“tiger of the air,’ swooping on silent wings, seizes him in his relentless 
talons. The whip-poor-will continues calling and you turn over and sleep 
the sleep of the tired outing man till morning breaks. 
Have you ever gone over the trail in the early morning of June before 
sun-up, walking slowly and noiselessly, listening to the last tired calls of the 
whip-poor-wills and again to the distant, somnolent voice of the great 
horned owl and the near twitter of half-awake birds in the shrubs? Then, 
as the purple night gave way to the dull grey of false dawn and the first 
warm flushes of morning in the east, have you heard the field sparrows 
beginning their matin song, which in turn would be carried on by the 
ventriloquial cat-calls of the yellow-breasted chat, the ringing notes of the 
chewink, and finally by one singer after another until the full-throated 
brown thrasher crowned the chorus with a rich outpouring of song? No? 
Then you have much before you. 
The beachcomber pacing the sands has the large herring gulls and 
their smaller confreres, the ring-bills and Bonapartes, (wonderful divers) 
for company, especially in spring and fall. Then there are the common 
terns, ‘‘sea-swallows,” most graceful fiiers, and, occasionally the great 
Caspian tern winging by in the fall. The busy sandpipers, with vibrating 
legs, everlastingly search the shore for flotsam. The great blue heron, 
- ankle deep in water, stands and spears his prey. Of the shore birds, only 
the spotted sandpiper and the piping plover stay through the summer to 
nest. Some immature, non-breeding, herring and ring-billed gulls remain 
to feed. 
Along the shore dune, the prairie warbler, a rare bird in our region, 
sings his zeezeezeezeezeezeezee in ascending scale, keeping watch over his 
territory which may extend from one-quarter to one-half mile along the 
shore. The chipping sparrow nests in the junipers, the tree swallow in the 
hollows of dead trees, the bank swallow in the wind-cut banks, the ever 
watchful crow in the pines. 
In the deeper valleys back of the shore are heard the songs of the 
scarlet tanager and the red-eyed vireo. The hummingbird nests here. The 
ruffed grouse rising from her nest in the fallen leaves startles the intruder 
as she whirrs away on vibrant wing's, with noise like an airplane motor. 
In the more open woods, among the shrubs, the field sparrow, the 
chewink, the indigo bunting and the mourning dove (which in the dunes 
nests on the ground) have their homes. Overhead, usually on a dead limb, 
the wood pewee makes its nest, so like the limb on which it rests that it 
can scarcely be distinguished. 
In the dune ponds, we find the rails, the coots, the grebes, the great 
and least bitterns, the long-billed marsh wrens and red-winged blackbirds, 
our interesting grassy-pond colony. Formerly, no doubt, on pond margins, 
in marshes and meadows, adjacent to the dunes, many ducks made their 
nests—mallards, blue-winged teal, shovellers; now only a few drop down 
during the migrations, to be met by a blizzard from the sportsman’s gun. 
