In birds you see pure action personified, an endless spontaneity reacting to the air, the season, the light, and on clear nights the constellations that may help them find their way. A flock of red-backed sandpipers or sanderlings, all spinning, wheeling, and sun-reflecting at once, have an ecstatic dash, a common brightness set going in them which must carry them a long way. They are long-distance migrants flitting from one end of the earth, one shore line to the next, and judging by their actions it is hard to believe that they could ever rest. Searching for crustaceans or sand worms along the beach, they run on flickering black legs, bodies tilted forward, flitting, bobbing in syncopation. When close to the surf they may fly up briefly when it piles in and then drop down again when it retreats. With their quick, automatic run, and heads constantly jerking forward and back they seem to be endowed with an almost comic gift of hurrying. Suddenly, with a sharp piping cry a sanderling flies off the beach and then disappears like a gray chip over the water, a tide bird faster than the tides, where there is no following it. This bird is quick and sweet, and cleans the earth of too much hesitation. Of all the birds that visit the beach during fall and winter I take most delight in the snow buntings. They have such freshness in them, skimming the cliffs, rushing by like bits of foam. The white in their plumage is so pure, snow paths between markings of black and cinnamon, like briers and weed stalks, with suggestions of greenish gray when the sun shines on them. They are birds of the Arctic tundra, companions of the musk ox. They fly up suddenly, as they are constantly doing at the least disturbance, their whiteness dancing up above the beach or along the faces of the cliffs, and then settle down again, pecking away, at home in wastes and barren land, the lonely stretches of the world, these are flowers, snowflakes, foam, fitted to a poverty and its freedom.