Gray Lady and the Birds: Stories of the Bird Year for Home and School

by Mabel Osgood Wright

“Have you patience to follow the history of the flight of one bird? The longest migration route is taken by some of the wading-birds, especially the American Golden Plover, the Eskimo Curlew, and the Turnstone. The journey of the Plover, in itself like a fable, is wonderful enough to be told in detail.

“In the first week of June, they arrive at their breeding-grounds in the bleak, wind-swept ‘barren grounds’ above the Arctic Circle, far beyond the tree line. Some even venture 1000 miles farther north (Greely found them at latitude 81 degrees). While the lakes are still ice-bound, they hurriedly fashion shabby little nests in the moss only a few inches above the frozen ground. By August, they have hastened to Labrador, where, in company with Curlews and Turnstones, they enjoy a feast. Growing over the rocks and treeless slopes of this inhospitable coast is a kind of heather, the crowberry, bearing in profusion a juicy black fruit. The extravagant fondness shown for the berry by the birds, among which the Curlew, owing to its greater numbers, is most conspicuous, causes it to be known to the natives as the ‘curlewberry.’ The whole body of the Curlew becomes so saturated with the dark-purple juice that birds whose flesh was still stained with the colour have been shot 1000 miles south of Labrador.

GOLDEN PLOVER

“After a few weeks of such feasting, the Plovers become excessively fat, and ready for their great flight. They have reared their young under the midnight sun, and now they seek the southern hemisphere. After gaining the coast of Nova Scotia, they strike straight out to sea, and take a direct course for the easternmost islands of the West Indies. Eighteen hundred miles of ocean waste lie between the last land of Nova Scotia and the first of the Antilles, and yet 600 more to the eastern mainland of South America, their objective point. The only land along the route is the Bermuda Islands, 800 miles from Nova Scotia. In fair weather, the birds fly past the Bermudas without stopping; indeed, they are often seen by vessels 400 miles or more east of these islands.

“When they sight the first land of the Antilles, the flocks often do not pause, but keep on to the larger islands and sometimes even to the mainland of South America. Sometimes a storm drives them off the main track, when they seek the nearest land, appearing not infrequently at Cape Cod and Long Island.

“A few short stops may be made in the main flight, for the Plover swims lightly, and easily, and has been seen resting on the surface of the ocean; and shore-birds have been found busily feeding 500 miles south of Bermuda and 1000 miles east of Florida, in the Atlantic, in that area known as the Sargasso Sea, where thousands of square miles of seaweed teem with marine life.

“Though feathered balls of fat when they leave Labrador and still plump when they pass the Bermudas, the Plovers alight lean and hungry in the Antilles. Only the first, though the hardest, half of the journey is over. How many days it has occupied may never be known. Most migrants either fly at night and rest in the day or vice versa, but the Plover flies both night and day.

“After a short stop of three or four weeks in the Antilles and on the north-eastern coast of South America, the flocks disappear, and later their arrival is noted at the same time in southern Brazil and the whole prairie region of Argentina and Patagonia. Here they remain from September to March (the summer of the southern hemisphere), free from the responsibilities of the northern summer they have left. The native birds of Argentina are at the time engrossed in family cares; but, remember this well, no wayfarer from the north nests in the south; he has a second summer free from care!

“After a six months’ vacation the Plovers resume the serious affairs of life and start back toward the Arctic zone, but not by the same course. Their full northward route is a problem still unsolved. They disappear from Argentina and shun the whole Atlantic coast from Brazil to Labrador. In March they appear in Guatemala and Texas; April finds their long lines trailing across the prairies of the Mississippi valleys; the first of May sees them crossing our northern boundary; and by the first week in June they reappear at their breeding-grounds in the frozen North. What a journey! Eight thousand miles of latitude separates the extremes of their course, and 3000 miles of longitude constitutes the shorter diameter, and all for the sake of spending ten weeks on an Arctic coast! Do you realize this endurance when you see birds passing that window?