Collected four birds from the nests and all proved to be males on dissection. Also a bird which was accidentally stepped on while it was shielding four young or "downies" was a male. In fact, after the eggs are laid both birds are seldom seen around the nest. The incubating bird is most solicitous about its nest. It sits very closely and, when flushed, half runs, half flutters for a few feet as if trying to lead the intruder away. If you are not deceived by these actions but remain quiet, the bird soon returns and walks daintily about, uttering a quickly repeated peep, peep, peep, often with such vehemence that the saliva fairly runs from its bill.
Mr. Moore (1912), however, shot a bird which he thought was both incubating and singing, and it proved to be a female.
Sometimes both parents show solicitude for the young as in the following case in the Yukon region, reported by Dr. Louis B. Bishop (1900):
I came upon a female surrounded by four downy young. Both parents tried time and again the well known wounded-bird tactics to lure me from the spot where the young were hidden in the bunches of grass, and finding this a failure, would circle around me only a few yards off, uttering a plaintive twitter.
Plumages.—[Author's note: The tiny chick of the least sandpiper is prettily colored as are the young of all the tundra nesting species. The upper parts, crown, back, wings, and thighs, are quite uniformly variegated with rich browns, "bay," "chestnut" and "Sanford's brown," through which the black basal down shows in places; this is spotted irregularly, from crown to rump, with small round spots, terminal tufts, of yellowish buff. The forehead and sides of the head and neck are pale buff, with narrow, black frontal, loral and malar stripes. The under parts are pure white.
Young birds are in juvenal plumage when they arrive here in August and generally do not show much signs of molting before they leave here in September. This plumage is darker and more richly colored above than in the spring adult; the feathers of the crown, back, scapulars and all wing coverts are broadly edged with rich, bright browns, "hazel" or "cinnamon rufous," broadest and brightest on the back and scapulars; some scapulars are tipped with white; the throat is often faintly, but sometimes not at all, streaked with dusky. A partial postjuvenal molt in the fall, involving the body plumage and some of the scapulars and tertials, produces a first winter plumage which can be distinguished from the adult by the retained juvenal wing coverts, scapulars, and tertials. At the first prenuptial molt the next spring young birds become indistinguishable from adults, except for some of the old juvenal wing coverts.
The complete postnuptial molt of adults begins in August and is mainly accomplished after the birds have migrated. At a partial prenuptial molt, mainly in April and May, the adult renews the body plumage and tail and some of the tertials and wing coverts. Adults in spring are more brightly colored, with more rufous and buffy edgings, and the breast is more distinctly streaked than in fall.]
Food.—These birds appear to be feeding on small crustaceans and worms on the beaches and on insects and their larvae in the marshes. It is to be hoped that with the increase of the birds the pest of green-head flies and of mosquitoes in the salt marshes may diminish. E. A. Preble (1923) examined two stomachs from birds shot in the Pribilof Islands and found that one of them contained amphipods exclusively, the other the following items: "23 seeds of bottle brush (Hippuris vulgaris), 50 per cent; bits of hydroid stems, 40 per cent; and chitin from the blue mussel (Mytilus edulis), 10 per cent." A. H. Howell (1924) reports as follows: "Of the 19 stomachs of this bird collected in Alabama, practically all contained larvae or pupae of small flies (Chironomidae) in a few bits of aquatic beetles were found." Dr. Alexander Wetmore (1916) found in the stomach of a bird taken in Porto Rico "the heads of more than 100 minute fly larvae (75 per cent) and fragments of small beetles (Hetercerus sp.) (25 per cent)."
Behavior.—The least sandpiper has always been a confiding and an unsuspicious bird, and these characteristics have increased since it has been protected at all seasons. So diligent are they in their search for food that they appear to take no notice of man if he remain quiet, and they run about almost at his feet. They are fascinating birds to watch. Not only are they gregarious, collecting in large and small flocks on the migrations, but they are also of a sociable disposition and associate amicably with other shore birds, large and small. They run around among yellow legs like pigmies among giants. A mixed company of several kinds of sandpipers and of plovers feeding together is a common sight. In flight the different species, although in company, generally, but not always, keep by themselves.