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It is remarkable from its quiet habits; it lives entirely on the sea-beach, like a sandpiper. Besides these birds only few others inhabit this broken land. In my rough notes I describe the strange noises, which, although frequently heard within these gloomy forests, yet scarcely disturb the general silence.
"Sandpipers don't bore in the ground for their food, but just pick it up; so they keep along the shore of either fresh or salt water, some kinds choosing one place and some another. The Spotted Sandpiper is another of the little fellows who sometimes nests back in those meadows. He is not a bit shy, but runs about as tame as a Robin, and he isn't as big as a Robin either.
"Is it aisy broke they are, Grannie?" said Pete. A good spirit looked out of his great boyish face. "Come to your ould daddie, you lil sandpiper. Gough bless me, Kitty, the weight of him, though! This child's a quarter of a hundred if he's an ounce. He is, I'll go bail he is. Look at him! Guy heng, Grannie, did ye ever see the like, now! It's absolute perfection.
It was an impressive sight, rendered double so be the sudden manner in which it was revealed to us by that scene-shifter the Wind. I saw blackbirds at this place, and sparrows, and the solitary sandpiper and the Canada woodpecker, and a large number of hummingbirds. Indeed, I saw more of the latter here than I ever before saw in any one locality. Their squeaking and whirring were almost incessant.
In a moment a poor little sandpiper emerged from the bushes, dragging itself along in such a way that, had you seen it, you would have concluded that every bone in its body had been broken. Such a dilapidated bird! Its wings drooped and its legs hung as if almost lifeless.
Smaller birds are no less daring. One evening last summer I was walking up the Ristigouche from Camp Harmony to fish for salmon at Mowett's Rock, where my canoe was waiting for me. As I stepped out from a thicket on to the shingly bank of the river, a spotted sandpiper teetered along before me, followed by three young ones. Frightened at first, the mother flew out a few feet over the water.
What reality could equal my memory of the firs where the rabbits burrowed, of the drain where we fished for minnows, of the long strand with the lake far away in summertime? How well I remember that yellow sand, hard and level in some places as the floor of a ball-room. The water there is so shallow that our governess used to allow us to wander at will, to run on ahead in pursuit of a sandpiper.
Eggs are variously coloured, and some are so marked that the blending of their colours with those of their surroundings renders them inconspicuous. Thus those of the Killdeer, Sandpiper, and Nighthawk, for example, are not easily distinguished from the ground on which they lie.
Even under ordinary conditions grasshoppers are a staple food of many members of the shorebird family, and the following species are known to feed on them: Shorebirds are fond of other insect pests of forage and grain crops, including the army worm, which is known to be eaten by the killdeer and spotted sandpiper; also cutworms, among whose enemies are the avocet, woodcock, pectoral and Baird sandpipers, upland plover, and killdeer.
At the next bend, where the current has cut the bank straight down I should look for the rows of holes made by the little colony of bank swallows. I should steal around the sharp bend by the old willow to see a little sandpiper on the boulder in mid-stream as of old.
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