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VALUE TO OUR NATION OF THE VANISH-
ING WATER BIRDS, DENIZENS OF THE AIR,
EARTH AND SEA
  persistently uttered cries of warning from the
turalists as to the rapid vanishing of our shore and
Ater birds has at last awakened us to an appreciation
the seriousness of the situation and made us realize
w desolate our ponds, marshes and beaches would
without those beautiful and useful feathered deni-
              zens. How sweet their plaintive cries as they fly
low over the reeds and grasses of the marsh! How charming their
advancing and retreating dance with the waves of the sea, as they
rush up the beach just ahead of the white breakers and as swiftly
follow the ebb! How graceful the strong-winged flights straight out
to the deep waters where they rest and sleep on the bosom of the sea
in safety, far from  the reach of mankind, their dreaded foe
rather than their trusted protector! These wonderful birds are
equally at home on the land, the sea and the air. They are clad,
as Mabel Osgood Wright says, "in feathers that blend in their hues
the sky, the water, the mottled sands of the shore, the bronzed splendor
of the seaweeds and the opalescence that lines the sea-shell." They
are indeed wildings, never coming      to nest in our gardens,
never permitting the least friendly advance on our part, hiding their
nests in regions so remote that the most enthusiastic bird lover
has been unable to locate them. We who wish to understand them
better, to claim tardy friendship with them, must go to their haunts-
"the banks of a river or lake that furnishes shelter and sustenance
alike to nesting bird and the restless migrant; or the shore of the sea
with its possibilities and changing moods,-the sea that stretches
infinitely on, ribbed by light-guarded reefs where the gulls flock
and the petrels dash in the wakle of cautious ships, its arms reaching
landward cuntil the bay where the wild ducks float, laps the shore,
where the sandpipers patter, and creeping on through the land as
a sluggish creek, traverses the marshes where the rail clamors about
his half-floating nest and finally mingling with fresh downward
currents loses its way among gaunt trees, where the herons and bit-
terns build, and is absorbed by some low, wood-girt meadow, where
the last earth-filtered drops make mud, from which the snipe and
woodcock probe their insect food, and give a deeper green to the
coarse grasses where the plover pipes."ý
   Their -songs and nesting habits are so different from the other
birds that they hve o      up new fields of observation, as if they
were a separate creation. They have been given a wonderful power of
concealment, in their protective coloring, even in their structure of
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