INTRODUCTORY CHAPTERS.
guarded reefs, where the Gulls flock and the Petrels dash in the wake of cautious ships, its arms reaching landward until the bay, where the Wild Ducks float, laps the shore, where the Sandpipers patter; and creeping on through the land as a sluggish creek, traverses the marshes where the Rail clamours about his half-floating nest, and finally ming? ling with fresh downward currents loses its way among gaunt trees, where the Herons and Bitterns build, and is absorbed by some low, wood-girt meadow, where the last earth-filtered drops make mud, from which the Snipe and Woodeock probe their insect food, and give a deeper green to the coarse grasses where the Plover pipes.
The Water-birds have another claim also upon your at-tention; you may study them in autumn and winter, and they fill many gaps in the bird year by their presence at seasons when the Land-birds are few. The majority of Water-birds come to us as migrants, or as winter visitors: the Herons, Bitterns, several of the Rails, a feir Plovers, and Sandpipers breed in our marshes, and the beautiful Wood Duck nests in the river copse. When these birds breed, however, the high tides and spring-flooded meadows render it very difficult to approach the nests, or to gain a satisfactory knowledge of the birds themselves, and the same difficulty obtains in watching the migrants on their upward course. But in autumn the conditions are changed, especially in seasons of summer drought, and as the Land-birds withdraw, one by one, you will have the leisure to go shore. ward.
The Plovers, Rails, and Sandpipers begin to gather in early August, and from that time until the rivers and creeks are ice coated, the Water-fowls will be passing every day, and from twilight until dawn. Various Ducks will go over the garden itself, and next day you will find them feeding in the sluggish marsh pools, where you gathered the cat-tail-flags and rose-mallows, or else floating on the millpond in the place of the summer lilies.
The Gulls return to the bar and shore islands, from their breeding-haunts at the eastern end of the Sound.
The old
22
