The magic touch of water following its expected channels quickens an otherwise barren plain into a paradise of avian activities. Ducks of six or seven species frequent the deeper channels; coots and gallinules and pied-billed grebes crowd the sedgy margins of the ponds; herons, bitterns, ibises, and egrets, seven species of Herodiones, all told, occupy the reedy depths of the larger ponds or deploy over the grassy levels. Rails creak and titter, red wings clink, yellow-headed blackbirds gurgle, wrangle, and screech; while the marsh wrens, familiar spirits of the maze, sputter and chuckle over their quaint basketry. The tricolored blackbirds, also in great silent companies recruited from a hundred acres, charge into their nesting covert with a din of uncanny preoccupation. Over the open ponds black terns hover, and Forster terns flit with languid ease. The killdeer is not forgotten, nor the burrowing owl, whose home is in the higher knolls; but over all and above all and through all comes the clamor of the black-necked stilt and the American avocet.
Of all these birds, the stilts were the most conspicuous in the wet meadows about Los Banos, where they were always noisy and aggressive. I have never seen them so abundant elsewhere, though I have seen them in similar situations in Florida and Texas, on extensive wet meadows where shallow water fills the hollows between myriads of little muddy islets and tufts of grass. Here they can wade about and feed in the water or build their nests on the hummocks above high-water mark, and here their young can hide successfully among the grassy tufts.
Nesting.—My first glimpse of a black-necked stilt was a complete surprise, and my first nest was in an unexpected situation. On May 8, 1903, we landed on Lake Key, in the Florida Keys, a low flat, open island with sandy shores and a lake in the middle of it. We walked across the beach, through a narrow strip of low red mangrove bushes and came to a little muddy pond, very shallow and dotted with little mangrove seedlings. Here we were delighted to see about half a dozen black-necked stilts, long slender birds, very striking in appearance and actions, the jet black wings contrasting finely with the pure white under parts and the long pink legs trailing behind. They seemed so much concerned, so unwilling to leave, and kept up such an incessant racket, that we felt sure that they were nesting there. A short search soon revealed two of their nests, both very conspicuously placed. The first nest, containing four quite heavily incubated eggs, was very prettily located under a little red mangrove root, just as it entered the ground; a hollow had been scraped in the sand and profusely lined with small bits of shell and pieces of dry sticks. The second nest was in plain sight on the open beach of finely broken shell in a small colony of least terns' nests, the three dark-colored eggs showing up very conspicuously on the white sand. The nest cavity measured six inches outside and four inches inside and was lined with pieces of shell, sticks, and fish bones, an odd and uncomfortable bed for the young. Besides the least terns, Wilson plovers were nesting close by, rather an unusual association for the marsh-loving stilts.
Gilbert R. Rossignol writes to me of a colony of some 23 nests that he found in a somewhat similar location on an island in Lake Kissimmee, Florida, on April 14, 1908. "The nests were all built high upon the gravelly beach and were lined with bits of fresh-water snails." This colony was wiped out later by a rise of water in the lake.
Herbert W. Brandt has sent me some notes on this species as he found it breeding in Kleberg County, Texas, on May 28, 1919. He found seven nests in a colony of about ten pairs on "a watery, marshy meadow covering about a square mile, the water being 6 to 12 inches deep." He describes one of the nests as "composed of sticks made up into a floating platform, about four inches high and well made. The lining was small sticks and the top basin shallow and nicely made. The water, exceedingly high from recent rains, was up to the eggs, so that the nest was wet." I saw a similar colony near Brownsville, Tex.
Near Los Banos, California, stilts were nesting all over the flooded meadows, on little hummocks, on the muddy islands, and along the margins of ponds. On the drier shores and banks the nests were very simple structures, hollows in the ground, lined with small twigs, weed stems, and grasses; but in the wet places, where they were liable to be flooded, they were quite elaborately elevated to considerable heights. Mr. Dawson (1923) writes:
It is when the water rises that the birds rise to the occasion, and get busy with nest building. Sedges, sticks, water plants with clinging soil, anything movable, is seized and forced under the threatened eggs. Indeed, so apprehensive is the bird of the growing necessity, that as often as she leaves the nest she will seize loose material and fling it over her shoulder for future use. The eggs themselves, protectively colored in bister and black, are mauled about and soiled in the mud; but the day is saved. I have seen a stilt, painfully conscious no doubt, squatted on a truncated cone of vegetation 8 inches in height and as broad across the top, a veritable Noah's ark of safety.
John G. Tyler (1913) says:
Nesting colonies of these waders in the Fresno district are never very large, consisting of from 6 to 20 pairs, as a rule, the most extensive one of which I have any knowledge containing an average of about 30 pairs each season. Possibly the numerous small ponds will not support a great many birds, and as suitable pastures abound in certain sections it is not a difficult matter for all the birds to be accommodated without any crowding. As these nesting colonies of stilts are invariably in pastures with cattle tramping everywhere over the fields, it seems almost a miracle that any of the eggs escape being destroyed; and yet I have not one iota of positive proof of such a disaster ever overtaking a stilt's nest, while in many instances I have known the eggs to hatch safely almost under the feet of stock. It is known that few animals will purposely step on any living object of a size large enough to be noticed, and the writer is convinced that a stilt simply remains on her nest and by her vociferousness and possibly even with a few vigorous thrusts of her long bill causes a grazing cow to direct her course away from the nest. A lack of judgment causes many nests to be abandoned each year, and a colony of stilts that are not able to distinguish between a permanent pond and one that has been caused by irrigation is liable to find that by the time sets of eggs are complete the water has disappeared and a new nesting site must be chosen. Fortunately the larger colonies always seem to be located near the permanent ponds, but there are numerous scattering pairs that are deceived each summer.
I have often been surprised at the great diversity of nesting sites, even in the same colony, it being not an unusual occurrence to find nests entirely surrounded by water—little islands of mud and sticks often built up out of water several inches deep. Not less common are the platforms of dried grass placed just at the water's edge, or the slight excavations that, killdeerlike, are placed on the bare ground a hundred yards or more from the nearest water. In one colony the majority of the nests were built on a levee that extended through the pond and were so near the waters edge that, although most of the nests were quite elaborate platforms of dry grass and twigs, the lower parts of the eggs were wet. Undoubtedly a high wind would have caused the wavelets to break over the levee. At this same place there were several nests far out on the open dry ground without even a spear of grass for concealment or protection, and with hardly a vestige of nesting material under the eggs. At one pond where two pairs had taken up summer quarters there was one nest on the bare black ground where the white breast of the sitting female was the most conspicuous object imaginable and could be seen at a glance from a distance of three or four hundred feet. In direct contrast was the other nest; for it was artfully hidden among rather rank salt grass some distance from the pond, and when the sitting bird flattened herself upon it, as is the custom of this species when endeavoring to escape observation, she might have readily been overlooked from any near-by point.