Page:Bird Life Throughout the Year (Salter, 1913).djvu/205

Rh the Wild Ducks, now all alike in plumage, for the drakes have undergone that curious transformation of dress which for nearly five months of the year renders them indistinguishable from their sober-coloured mates. Some broods of "flappers," not yet flying, take refuge amongst the reeds, which also afford shelter to the white-fronted Coots, each followed by her brood of young in black down with some rusty red about the head.

It is not too late for those who seek the sea in July to find much of interest about the sand-dunes and shingle-beaches of the coast. The shifting dunes, held together by the wiry marram-grass, form a miniature desert where every passer-by—rabbit, bird, lizard or insect—leaves a characteristic track in the finely sifted sand.

Where tracts of shingle and shell-beaches fringe the sand-dunes, the Ring Plover pipe anxiously, and the eye may chance to light on the four eggs, resting, like miniature peewits' point to point, in a slight hollow which, whatever may be said to the contrary, the bird often lines with a carefully-laid mosaic of small stones and bits of shell. Or the young, a little ball of grey cotton-wool on stilts, may be found running over the foreshore or squatting flat upon the shingle, in every tint and shade part and parcel of its surroundings. Here, too, Oyster-catchers, whose black and white dress has earned for them the name of "sea-pie,"