The summer turmoil was not yet in full voice but the barkers were there on behalf of beach-buggy tours over the dunes, and a sight-seeing plane flew by; cars drew up and droned away, and families staggered up from the beach with their load of towels, shoes, bags, or portable radios. The beach did not contain quite the great wealth of paper, cans, bottles, and general garbage that it would later on, in July and August, but one of the first things to catch my eye as I lunged down on to the sands was an electric-light bulb floating in the water, a can of shaving soap, the remains of a rubber doll, and a great scattering of sliced onions--probably thrown off a fishing boat. The air was dancing with heat. The sun seemed to have the power to glare through all things. With the exception of a camper’s tent on the upper part of the beach, and a few isolated gray shacks perched on dune tops behind it, there was nothing ahead but the wide belt of sand curving around one unseen corner after another with the flat easing and stretching sea beside me. Two boys waved to me from where they were perched high up on a dune, and I waved back. Then I heard an insistent, protesting bird note behind me, and a piping plover flew past. It was very pale, and sand colored, being a wild personification of the place it lived in. It suddenly volplaned down the slope of the beach ahead of me, fluttering, half disappearing in holes made by human feet, side-winged, edged away, still fluttering, in the direction of the shore line, and when it reached the water, satisfied, evidently, that it had led me far enough, it flew back. These birds nest on the beach above the high-tide line, and like a number of other species, try to lead intruders away when they come too close to their eggs and young. With high, grating cries, terns flew over the beach and low over the water, occasionally plummeting in after fish. Among the larger species, principally common terns, there were some least terns--a tiny, dainty version of the “sea swallow,” chasing each other back and forth. They have the graceful, sharply defined bodies and deep wingbeat of the other terns, but in their littleness and excitability they seem to show a kind of baby anger. Also there were tree swallows gathering and perching on the hot, glittering sand, and on smooth gray driftwood just below the dunes. It was a band of them, adults, and young hatched during the early spring, chittering and shining with their brilliant blue-green backs and white bellies. It seemed to me that out of these birds--my unwilling or indifferent companions--came a protest, the protest of a desert in its beauty, an ancient sea land claiming its rarity, with these rare inhabitants, each with its definition and assertion, each having the color and precision of life and place, out of an unknown depth of devising.