THOSE GREEN SANDPIPERS. F OR one bird-lover who thinks the green
sandpiper really must have " bred with us this year " there are thousands who do not think, who hold they heard the cuckoo in March. Still, the total of those who think the green sandpiper, this year or last, nested with us, could we arrive at it, would not prove insignificant. Even confirmed sceptics on this sort of subject are disposed to admit it possible. It has never been scientifically disproved—though, for the matter of that, neither has a March or February cuckoo calling in England been scientifically disproved. At any rate, after meeting with a green sandpiper or a pair of green sandpipers—or even a pair with their family—in about every month of the year, even confirmed sceptics can agree that " it looks uncommonly like it."
" Did you see anything interesting while fishing on the marsh this year ? " the vicar asked me lately. I could not say I had, if by interesting he meant scarce. The short-eared owls had departed before the season opened. A pair of hen-harriers had been seen lately —seen and promptly shot by a fool. That, however, was not on the marsh, but on high ground two or three miles off.
But what had happened to green sandpipers ? I asked the vicar. I had not seen one on the marsh or off it for a long time. He reassured me. The green sand- piper was seen last year a mile or two higher up stream. A pair were there with their young in the nesting season. The vicar and his neighbour held it highly likely the birds bred there last year. What did I think ? Well, I thought sceptically, as usual ; admitted it possible, thought it improbable. The fact is, long ago I had accepted and encouraged in print a statement that the jack-snipe nested one year on the marsh, and I had been rightly reprimanded—also in print—for saying so. This, with one or two other experiences of the kind, turned me gradually into an agnostic at least. The jack-snipe must be ruled out definitely. We will not hear, much less argue, about it nowadays. But the green sandpiper question may be left open. Certainly, if it never does lay its eggs and rear its young in Great Britain, it has a way calculated to deceive not the casual only but also the close students of bird life. My experience of green sandpipers is confined to one English county. It started in 1878 when, in childhood, I flushed a specimen from a dry pond in a dry valley, and had no idea as to its name or family. However, when a young bird-nester has once flushed the sandpiper, heard it cry, seen it fly straight away from him, identifi- cation can safely wait. That will come sure enough by and by. The white patch of the tail coverts will be his infal- lible guide. If only the writer had some such guide in regard to the pair of birds which, open-mouthed, he watched in the hazel wood near by a year later, and took to be reed-buntings—though it was winter and they appeared to be in full summer plumage—one of the baffling little conundrums of his childhood would be solved. If only he had some such guide to tell him whether those two accentors he watched in March, 1912, at El Kantara were a new species or not, it would have saved him the labour of looking up in vain books on Mediterranean or African birds, of making Museum inquiries equally in vain, and finally remaining for the rest of his life probably an agnostic as to those accentors.
The green sandpiper a-wing is one of the easiest birds to identify. Children in the villages about the marsh and river easily identify him (or they did a generation since). The village name is (or was) " martin snipe." How much more helpful and telling a name than Totanus ochropus ! I believe in the Classics, and want some Latin and distinctly more Greek : but not in our birdlore —a little of it there goes such a long way.
What makes many green sandpipers come over to us from North-East Europe, from Arctic Circle to Central Russia, in June and July and bring with them their newly-fledged young ? It must mean a journey of a full thousand miles and more. The voyage must have perils, too. But, as regards that, most birds are in constant peril of their lives, whether they stay at home or travel. Moussier's redstart, a bird of North Africa, is said to be absolutely stationary. It never travels. Canon Tristram—unread to-day by the vast majority of bird-lovers, perhaps unknown to them ; yet a master- writer on birds—says of Moussier : " While one race of man like another has rushed like a flood over North Africa and left a faint trace of invasion in a few ruins on the shores or in the tide marks of some wreck of humanity on the mountain sides—long before the first Phoenician galley had entered the Bay of Tunis and treated with the Numidian king, before either Roman, Vandal, or Saracen had disturbed his retreats—Moussier was here, never disturbed by a restless haste for migration or an appetite for the slopes of Alps or Apennines, as a gentle and genuine Numidian, the one local and peculiar bird." Yet, probably, Moussier knows perils in its stay-at-home life as great as those of many species which twice a year rush across thousands of miles of land and water. The same may be true of butterflies. Is the life of th e painted lady butterfly or the red admiral, both great travellers, on the average shorter and more perilous than the life of a meadow-brown or a small heath butterfly, insects which, so far as I know, do not make journeys over land and sea ? So, perhaps, the green sandpiper is as safe travelling here with its young as in June and July in its nesting quarters. But why a certain number with their young should visit us then is, all the same, hard to understand. If our food and climate suit these birds, old and young, in June and July, why have they never been discovered nesting here in April or May ? That England does suit the green sandpiper not only then but in the depth of winter, too, seems clear enough. Saunders, in his Manual of British Birds—a fine book for chilly autumn evenings by the fire—tells us that it can thrive here in weather which makes the snipe lean.
The green sandpiper has long appealed to me as a haphazard creature, irregular in the time of its appearance, in the choice of its temporary ha.tnt. I do not know when to expect or where to find my green sandpipers. Having, by merest chance, flushed one in meadow or marsh, I should have small hope of finding it back at the same spot next day, or any other day in the year. With its wild note of alarm, " tui-tui-tui ! " it is up and swiftly away on a glancing wing, I know not whither ; and the fugitive seems to know as little as the observer as to where and when it is going to alight. This can scarcely be the experience of those who have watched it with its family in June or July and seen it so often then that they believe it has nested in their district. But the isolated green sandpipers we put up when least we are looking for them seem nothing if not methodless and mapless in arrival and departure. This surrounds them with an atmosphere of mystery. And in mystery exists for many of us one of the greatest charms of a
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