Page:Bird Haunts and Nature Memories - Thomas Coward (Warne, 1922).pdf/80

52 dozed; others attended to their plumage, but whether awake or, apparently, asleep, they hopped nearer and nearer as the water pushed them up the sloping rocks. The ringed plovers did not pack with the dunlins, but ran in the shallow water, snapping up the tiny shrimp-like crustaceans which came ashore with every ripple. Sanderlings, already in grey winter garments, came to join the throng, for the love of companionship is strong in small waders; the Deeside fisherman classes all three, and any strangers such as stints, as "little birds"; they are hardly worth powder and shot, unless he can rake a crowd and pick the victims up by the dozen.

A few yards away, on the red rock, a single knot, grey-backed, black-billed and olive-legged, dozed unconcernedly, and soon some fifty or sixty of these inhabitants of the Far North, breeders in Greenland or the little known Taimyr, swept past, followed immediately by many hundreds, which, after a sharp swing, dropped on the sand, each in alighting holding its pointed wings erect for a noticeable interval. They crowded, as they always do, and ran, a little grey cloud on the ruddy sand, calling a chorus of sharp notes, knut, knut. Fanciful writers connected the bird which wades and runs back before the advancing waves with the tradition of Canute, but the longshore man, who named the bird before Linnæus invented canutus, knew more about its voice than such writers as Camden and Drayton, and perhaps had never heard of King Canute.

The little birds were soon joined by a motley band, for variation in age and season makes the turnstone a harlequin in dress; happy the man who first names them "tortoiseshell plovers." There was no weed on the rocks to be thrown over, no pebbles to be turned, so the little party rested at the edge of a sandstone ridge. With them were one or two purple sandpipers, stout little