58. Tern alighting on nest. Same nest as Nos. 60–62.
Obviously the only manner in which photographs of the Terns on their nests could be secured was to conceal one’s camera near the nest and retire, with a tube or thread, to a distance of a hundred feet or more. A nest was therefore selected about halfway up the bank on the westerly side of the island, the camera staked to the ground with long iron pins, and completely covered with the dried seaweed abundant on the beach below. I then attached a black linen thread to the shutter and retired about one hundred feet to the top of the bank. Almost as soon as I lay down the tumult overhead ceased, the birds scattered, and the rasping te-a-r-r-r note of alarm was replaced by a variety of calls, showing these birds to be possessed of an unexpectedly extended vocabulary. One call was a chirp not unlike the White-throated Sparrow’s, a second might be written tue, tue, tue, and was uttered when one bird was in pursuit of another.
59. Tern on hillside nest.
The seaweed not only concealed the camera perfectly, but was so abundant near the bird’s nest that the appearance of a fresh mound apparently did not even excite the bird’s curiosity, and within twenty minutes it had returned to its eggs. It happened, however, that the nature of the site chosen induced the bird to face the water, and as the camera was above, and consequently behind it, the view presented did not show it to advantage, but after several unsuccessful trials the attempt to secure a more flattering view was abandoned.[59]
A bird was now chosen who was incubating two eggs placed in a depression in a little mound of seaweed on the beach. On this occasion the camera was placed on a driftwood box, weighted with stones, and completely covered with seaweed. These eggs were hatching, and the bird soon returned to them; but before it had come back, another bird in darting by had flown into the thread, springing the shutter, and making the picture[60] of the nest and eggs here given quite as effectively as many a similarly inexperienced photographer could have done.
60. Tern’s nest and hatching eggs in seaweed.
The day but one following—July 20th—these eggshells had disappeared, and the nest was occupied by two young birds with just enough strength to crawl toward the parent bird when it appeared with food.[61] And when their appetites were appeased the parent bird took her place on the nest and brooded them with the care of an anxious hen.[62]
A few yards from this new family were two young who could not have been over four days old, but who had left the nest for the shade of a piece of driftwood. Here they were fed by two birds—doubtless both parents—whom they seemed to recognize among the other Terns hovering above them. They were apparently fed on small fish, which the parent bird placed in their open mouths while standing just within reaching distance. None of the several pictures of these birds were wholly successful, but in all of them the old birds seem to be much more graceful in form than the parent of the newly hatched young in the seaweed.