Dr. Coues wrote in an interesting manner of this bird. He said that the Northern Phalarope is “a curious compound of a wader and swimmer. Take one of our common little sandpipers, fit it for sea by making oars of its feet, and launch it upon the great deep, you have a Northern Phalarope. You may see a flotilla of these little animated cockle-boats riding lightly on the waves anywhere off the coast of New England.”
Its habits at the mating season are most interesting, and no words can better describe them than those of Mr. E. W. Nelson: “As the season comes on when the flames of love mount high, the dull-colored male moves about the pool, apparently heedless of the surrounding fair ones. Such stoical indifference usually appears too much for the feelings of some of the fair ones to bear. A female coyly glides close to him and bows her head in pretty submissiveness, but he turns away, pecks at a bit of food and moves off; she follows and he quickens his speed, but in vain; he is her choice, and she proudly arches her neck and in mazy circles passes and repasses close before the harassed bachelor. He turns his breast first to one side, then to the other, as though to escape, but there is his gentle wooer ever pressing her suit before him. Frequently he takes flight to another part of the pool, all to no purpose. If with affected indifference he tries to feed she swims along side by side, almost touching him, and at intervals rises on wing above him and, poised a foot or two over his back, makes a half dozen quick, sharp wing-strokes, producing a series of sharp, whistling noises in rapid succession. In the course of time it is said that water will wear the hardest rock, and it is certain that time and importunity have their full effect upon the male of this Phalarope, and soon all are comfortably married, while mater familias no longer needs to use her seductive ways and charming blandishments to draw his notice.”
Then after the four dark and heavily marked eggs are laid the “captive male is introduced to new duties, and spends half his time on the eggs, while the female keeps about the pool close by.”
NORTHERN PHALAROPE.
(Phalaropus lobatus.)
¾ Life-size.
FROM COL. CHI. ACAD. SCIENCES.
These birds, which possess such dainty elegance in all their motions, do not exhibit a corresponding degree of taste in home building. Their nests, at best, consist of only a few blades of grass and fragments of moss laid loosely together. Often the eggs are laid in some convenient hollow, with no bedding whatever except that which happened to lodge there.
These are a few of the facts in the life history of this bird, which starts in its career as a little ball of buff and brown and later in life “glides hither and thither on the water, apparently drifted by its fancy, and skims about the pool like an autumn leaf wafted before the playful zephyrs on some embosomed lakelet in the forest.”
OUR LITTLE MARTYRS.
Do we care, you and I,
For the songbirds winging by?