Page:Bird-lore Vol 06.djvu/20



The Black Tern at Home
By ERNEST THOMPSON SETON and FRANK M. CHAPMAN

With photographs from nature

RAIK—craik—craik!” screamed the old Black Tern, in anxious quavering note. as we crossed the low prairie to the particular pond that she had consecrated by making her home on its weedy waters.

The nest had been discovered on June [6. [901. not far from our camp, near Shoal Lake. Manitoba. A small knob of mud and water-soaked vegetation was selected as a foundation on which to place the nest of coarse reeds. At this time it contained one egg. On June 18 a second egg was laid and without waiting for the usual complement of three, incubation was begun.

At no time during this remarkable period of a bird's year did the Terns fail to resent intrusion on their haunts. The Blue-winged Teal and Wilson‘s Phalarope nesting in the long grasses on the border of the slough ﬂuttered from their eggs only when one seemed about to step upon them, but the Tern sprang into the air and. with sharp screams, came to meet us when we were thirty yards away.

On June 25, there occurred an unusually heavy fall of rain, raising the water in the slough several inches and threatening to inundate the little island. But the Terns saved their eggs from the Hood by bringing fresh nesting material and raising the height of their home; though whether the action was performed with a definite object or was merely such a display of the nest-building instinct as is not infrequently seen during incubation, it is difficult to determine.

On July 5, after an incubation period, therefore, of seventeen days, the first egg hatched. Three days later we visited the nest. expecting to see a pair of downy young, but, to our surprise and disappointment, it was deserted. Evidently, however, there was something not far away in which