[Original Size]
Plate XXX.—STERNA ANTILLARUM, (Less.) Coues.—Least Tern.
For diminutiveness of size, nimbleness and grace of action, this species stands alone among its kin, and has been very properly likened in its movements to the sprightly, elfish Humming-bird. This comparison holds true in this latter particular, as those who have had the privilege of watching these Terns in their pleasurable aerial diversions can testify, but there is lacking that essentiality which makes the other seem, when fluttering before a tulip, a mere materialized sylph from the land of dreams.
Nothing can give the enthusiastic lover of Nature more true and unalloyed happiness than the study of our aquatic friend in his own loved haunts, and while in the delightful exercise of his volant powers.
His majestic sailing through the pellucid atmosphere, whether for pleasure or game, the beautiful equipoise of body as on motionless wings he hangs suspended above the liquid abyss below, the sudden, impetuous, hawk-like plunge when some luckless sprat rises to view, and last, but not least, the easy manner with which he arrests his downward course and bounds aloft, must be seen to form an adequate conception of the wonderful powers of flight with which the least of all our Terns is endowed.
Although fond of the deep-blue sea, with its sad and never-ending-monotone, and the dreary, almost barren waste of sands that line its tortuous, plantless shores, it is by no means an exclusive dweller by such haunts. Inspired by a love of adventure, and burning for new sights and forms of life, it quits the shadow of Neptune's trident, and wends its way up the various water-courses that tend seaward, to quieter inland scenes.
While more especially abundant in maritime regions, it is, however, more general in tracts remote therefrom than has been commonly supposed. So that instead of the whole vast army betaking themselves to the thousand miles stretching along the Atlantic, many from the Gulf in the South, may be seen, when the tide of migration has set in, wending their ways in small parties along the vast central artery of our land to the distant valley of the Missouri, and elsewhere. Towards the setting sun, another current takes its northward course, but spends its strength on the mild, equable shores of California before any considerable elevation is attained.