_Behavior._--Avocets are at all times tame and unsuspicious, very solicitous and aggressive on their breeding grounds, quiet and indifferent at other times, showing only mild curiosity. Their demonstrations of anxiety on their nesting grounds, particularly if they have young, are amusing and ludicrous. Utterly regardless of their own safety, they meet the intruder more than half way and stay with him till he leaves. W. Leon Dawson (1909) has described it very graphically, as follows: The mother bird had flushed at a hundred yards, but seeing our position she flew toward us and dropped into the water some 50 feet away. Here she lifted a black wing in simulation of maimed stiffness, and flopped and floundered away with the aid of the other one. Seeing that the ruse failed, she ventured nearer and repeated the experiment, lifting now one wing and now both in token of utter helplessness. After a while the male joined her, and we had the painful spectacle of a crippled family, whose members were uttering most doleful cries of distress, necessitated apparently by their numerous aches and breaks. Once, for experiment's sake, we followed, and the waders flopped along in manifest delight coaxing us up on shore and making off through the sagebrush with broken legs and useless wings. But we came back, finding it better to let the birds make the advances. The birds were driven to the very limit of frenzy, dancing, wing trailing, swaying, going through last convulsions and beginning over again without regard to logical sequence, all in an agony of effort to divert attention from those precious eggs. As time elapsed, however, the color of the play changed. Finding that the appeal of cupidity was of no avail, the birds appeared to fall back upon the appeal to pity. Decoying was useless, that was plain; so they stood with upraised wings, quivering and moaning, in tenderest supplication. It was too much even for conscious rectitude and we withdrew abashed.