After I had left Saskatchewan, Doctor Bishop visited the breeding grounds of the marbled godwits, and on July 3, 1906, found adult birds tolerably common, but they had all departed two days later. At Big Stick Lake, from July 18 to 21, 1906, he saw large flocks of adult godwits containing hundreds of birds, but on July 22 very few were left. He also writes that adults reach the North Carolina coast in the middle of July, as he has in his collection adults taken on July 11 and 27, 1904, and that young birds appear about a month later, as he has specimens taken August 10 and 19, 1904.
Evidently the godwits move off their breeding grounds as soon as the young are able to fly, those birds which have been unsuccessful in rearing their young being the first to leave, and forming the vanguard of the early migration in July. Probably most of the adults start on their southward migration before the end of July, and well in advance of the young, the later flight being composed almost entirely of young birds, and moving more deliberately.
The fall migration is or was very well marked and rather unique; many individuals formerly migrated almost due east from their breeding grounds in the interior to the Atlantic coast of New England. Others still continue to migrate westward to the Pacific coast and southward to the Gulf coast. All of the earlier writers indicate that this was an abundant migrant on the Atlantic coast from New England southward about the middle of the last century. The immense flocks which passed along our shores have been gradually disappearing until now only a few straggling birds are ever seen. Probably what comparatively few birds are left migrate to the Atlantic coast farther south or to the Gulf or Pacific coasts. Probably excessive shooting has driven them from their former haunts. They have always been popular with sportsmen and have been slaughtered unmercifully. They share with some other species the fatal habit, prompted by sympathy or curiosity, of circling back again and again over their fallen companions after a flock has been shot into, so that it is an easy matter for the gunners to kill them in large numbers.
Although it breeds and lives on the grassy meadows of the interior, the marbled godwit seems to prefer the seacoast on its migrations, frequenting more rarely the shores of large lakes. It is common as a migrant on the Pacific coast even as late as December, but it seems to be absent from California in January and February. Bradford Torrey (1913) says:
I have seen godwits and willets together lining the grassy edge of the flats for a long distance, and so densely massed that I mistook them at first for a border of some kind of herbage. Thousands there must have been; and when they rose at my approach, they made something like a cloud; gray birds and brown birds so contrasted in color as to be discriminated beyond risk of error, even when too far away for the staring white wing patches of the willets to be longer discernible.
As a flock there was no getting near them; I proved the fact to my dissatisfaction more than once; but sitting quietly on the same bay shore I have repeatedly known a single godwit or willet to feed carelessly past me within the distance of a rod or two.
Winter.—It is a comparatively short journey for this godwit to its winter home in the Gulf States and Central America. I have seen and collected a few godwits in Florida, but it is now impossible to see them in anything like the numbers mentioned by Audubon (1840) and Maynard (1896). The former says:
This fine bird is found during winter on all the large muddy flats of the coast of Florida that are intermixed with beds of racoon oysters. As the tide rises it approaches the shores, and betakes itself to the wet savannahs. At this season it is generally seen in flocks of five or six, searching for food in company with the telltale, the yellow shanks, the long-billed curlew, and the white ibis.
The latter writes:
The marbled godwits are very common in the South in winter, but they are particularly abundant in Florida. Back of Amelia Island, just south of St. Marys River, thus lying just on the extreme northern confines of the State, are extensive flats on which are pools that become partly dry during winter. These were the familiar resorts of the godwits, and flocks of hundreds would gather around them. They were quite wild while here, rising with deafening clamor when approached, but they had become so attached to the locality that they would merely circle about and alight on the borders of some neighboring pool. From this point, southward along the eastern coast as far as Merritts Island they were very numerous but were not common at Miami, and I did not see them on the Keys. On the west coast, however, they occurred in large numbers, especially on the muddy flats about Cedar Keys. On Indian River I found the godwits very unsuspicious, in so much so that I have frequently killed them with dust shot.