Life histories of North American shore birds, Part 1 (of 2)Bent, Arthur Cleveland
Science
Life histories of North American shore birds, Part 1 (of 2)
Bent, Arthur Cleveland
Birds -- Behavior; Shore birds -- North America
The nests are placed in shallow depressions among the brown clumps
of _Dryas integrifolia_ and _Elyna bellardi_ which grow among the
rubbles and gravel of the high ridges. The nest is merely a small
hollow, apparently rudely shaped by the nesting bird. The bird in
the nest is so like the terrane about her, that she is well-nigh
indistinguishable from it, even to one who knows exactly where she
is sitting. Trusting to her effective concealment, the mother bird
does not flush from the nest until almost pushed from it. When I
placed a camera only a foot from the sitting bird she did not
leave it. Though frightened so sorely that she panted and her
heart beat visibly, she stuck to her precious eggs. Her head
turned to the wind, she crouched flat upon the eggs, her feathers
ruffled wide to hide them. When finally I placed my hand upon her,
she broke away, trying by the well-known shore-bird device of
feigning injury and inability to fly to draw the intruders away.
The bird did not appear at all shy and when she failed to draw us
away, remained near us, evidently anxious, but trying to appear
unconcerned. Now and then she uttered a soft, but sharply pleading
call, more plaint than protest. One nesting bird did not leave her
eggs until Doctor Hunt pushed her, protesting plaintively quite
away from the nest, with the stock of his rifle.
A set of four eggs in Edward Arnold's collection was taken by Capt.
Joseph Bernard, July 1, 1918, on Taylor Island, Victoria Land. The nest
was in a dry spot in a wet marsh; there was a snow bank 50 yards from
the nest and a pond on the south side of the nest 100 yards away. He
watched the nest for three or four hours, from a hill 500 yards away,
but did not see the bird again.
_Eggs._--The knot lays four eggs, perhaps sometimes only three. The eggs
are ovate pyriform in shape, with a slight gloss. In the set of three
eggs, taken by the Crockerland expedition and now in Col. John E.
Thayer's collection, the ground colors vary from "pale olive buff" to
"olive buff"; they are spotted all over, but more thickly at the larger
end, with small spots or scrawls of "sepia," "Saccardo's umber," and
"Vandyke brown," with underlying spots of "pallid" and "pale brownish
drab."
The other set of four eggs, from the same source and now in the American
Museum of Natural History, is thus described for me by Ludlow Griscom:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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