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Bartramian Sandpiper — Part 2
Images coming soon.
On alighting, with their wings stretched high above their backs in plover fashion, these true sandpipers remain perfectly still for a minute, turning their slender necks now this way, now that, to reconnoitre, before they gracefully walk or run off to feed, bobbing their heads as if satisfied with the prospect as they go. They must devour grasshoppers by the million--another reason why they should be protected. In the nesting season, at least, the mates keep close together when feeding on berries and insects, that, however largely consumed, fail to fatten their slender bodies now. Anxiety, common to all true lovers and devoted parents, keeps them thin. A few blades of dry grass line the merest depression of the ground in some old field or open prairie that answers as a cradle for the four clay colored eggs spotted over with dark brown and clouded with purplish gray shell marks. Funny, top-heavy, fluffy little chicks tumble clumsily about through the grass in June.
The Buff-breasted Sandpiper (Tryngites subruficollis) closely allied to the larger upland "plover," like it prefers dry fields and grassy prairie lands, although during the migrations it too is often met with on beaches on the coasts of both oceans. Its upper parts are pale clay buff, the centre of each feather black or dark olive; the inner half of the inner webs of the dusky primaries is speckled with black, a diagnostic feature; the longer inner wing coverts are conspicuously marked and tipped with black edged with white; the feathers of under parts are pale buff edged with white and indistinctly marked. A few of these migrants rest awhile on the south shore of Long Island in the early autumn yearly. "They are an extremely active species when on the wing," writes Dr. Hatch, who studied them in Minnesota, "and essentially ploverine in all respects, seeking sandy, barren prairies where they live upon grasshoppers, crickets, and insects generally, and ants and their eggs especially. I have found them repasting upon minute mollusks on the sandy shores of small and shallow ponds, where they were apparently little more suspicious than the solitary sandpipers are notably. The flight is in rather compact form, dipping and rising alternately, and with a disposition to return again to the neighborhood of their former feeding places." "During the breeding season," says Mr. D. G. Elliot, "they indulge in curious movements, one of which is to walk about with one wing stretched out to its fullest extent and held high in the air. Two will spar like fighting-cocks, then tower for about thirty feet with hanging legs. Sometimes one will stretch himself to his full height, spread his wings forward and puff out his throat, at the same time making a clucking noise, while others stand around and admire him."