ed miles to pass the winter, while many
others go from Canada and the United States to Mexico, Central and
South America.

The ponds and sloughs of all that vast country lying between the Great
Lakes and Hudson Bay on the east and the mountains of the Far West,
constitute the principal nursery of North American waterfowl, whence,
in autumn, come the flocks of Ducks and Geese that in winter darken the
Southern {70} sounds and lakes. One stream moves down the Pacific
Coast, another follows the Mississippi Valley to the marshes of
Louisiana and Texas, while a third passes diagonally across the country
in a southeasterly direction until it reaches the Maryland and Virginia
coastline. Thence the birds disperse along the coastal country from
Maine to Florida.

[Illustration: Migration Routes of Some North American Birds]

_The Travelling Shore Birds._--Turnstones, Sanderlings, Curlews, and
other denizens of the beaches and salt marshes migrate in great numbers
along our Atlantic Coast. Some of them winter in the United States,
and others pass on to the West Indies and southward. The extent of the
annual journeys undertaken by some of these birds is indeed marvellous.
Admiral Peary has told me that he found shore birds on the most
northern land, where it slopes down into the Arctic Sea, less than five
hundred miles from the North Pole; and these same birds pass the winter
seven thousand miles south of their summer home. One of these
wonderful migrants is the Golden Plover. In autumn the birds leave
{72} eastern North America at Nova Scotia, striking out boldly across
the Atlantic Ocean, and they may not again sight land until they reach
the West Indies or the northern coast of South America. Travelling, as
they do, in a straight line, they ordinarily pass eastward of the
Bermuda Islands. Upon reaching South America, after a flight of two
thousand four hundred miles across the sea, they move on down to
Argentina and northern Patagonia. In spring they return by an entirely
different route. Passing up through western South America, and
crossing the Gulf of Mexico, these marvellous travellers follow up the
Mississippi Valley to their breeding grounds on the shores of the
Arctic Ocean. Their main lines of spring and fall migration are
separated by as much as two thousand miles. During the course of the
year the Golden Plover takes a flight of sixteen thousand miles.

_The World's Migrating Champion._--The bird which