Of these families, the most remarkable are the Curlew, _numenius_; the Godwit, _limosa_; the Sandpiper, _tringa_; the Tattler, _totanus_; the Plover, _charadrius_; the Snipe, _scolopax_; the Turnstone, _strepsilas_; the Sanderling, _calidris_; the Avoset, _recurvirostra_; and the Stilt, _himantopus_; all of which at some period of the year are visiters or temporary inhabitants of some portion of the Atlantic shores of North America, from the Bay of Boston to the Belize.
In the tepid waters of Florida, the great bay of Mobile, the sea lakes of Borgne and Pontchartrain, and all along the muddy shoals and alluvial flats of the lower Mississippi, these aquatic races dwell in myriads during the winter months, when the ice is thick even in the sea bays of the Delaware and Chesapeake, and when all the gushing streams and vocal rivulets of the Northern and Middle States, are bound in frozen silence. In the spring, according to the temperature of the season, from the middle of April until the end of May, these migratory tribes begin to visit us of the northern shores, from the Capes of the Chesapeake, along all the river estuaries, sea bars, lagoons, and land-locked bays, as they are incorrectly termed, of Maryland and Delaware, the Jersey shores and the Long Island waters, so far as to Boston Bay, beyond which the iron-bound and rugged nature of the coast deters them from adventuring, in the great flights with which they infest our more succulent alluvial shores and sea marshes.
With the end of May, with the exception only of a few loitering stragglers, wounded, perhaps, or wing-worn, which linger after the departure of their brethren, they have all departed, steering their way, unseen, at immense altitudes, through the trackless air, across the mighty continent, across the vast lakes of the north, across the unreclaimed and almost unknown hunting-grounds of the red man, to those remote and nearly inaccessible morasses of the Arctic Regions whither the foot of man has rarely penetrated, and where the silence of ages is interrupted only by the roll of the ocean surf, the thunderous crash of some falling iceberg, and the continuous clangor of the myriads and millions of aquatic fowl, which pass the period of reproduction in those lone and gloomy, but to them secure and delightful asylums. Early in the autumn, or, to speak more correctly, in the latter days of summer, the Bay birds begin to return in hordes innumerable, recruited by the young of the season, which, not having as yet indued the full plumage of their respective tribes, are often mistaken by sportsmen and gunners, unacquainted with the distinctions of natural history, for new species. During the autumn, they are much more settled and less restless in their habits than during the spring visit, when they are impelled northward by the irresistible _æstrum_, which at that period stimulates all the migratory birds, even those reared in confinement and caged from the nest, to get under way and travel, whither their wondrous instinct orders them, in order to the reproduction of their kind in the localities most genial and secure.