Bulletin - United States National Museum - si-pddr - Smithsonian ...

BIRDS OF ARGENTINA, PARAGUAY, URUGUAY, AND CHILE 147
the hotels in a surreptitious manner. As game birds were served
with head and tarsus intact it was a simple matter to determine that
the birds offered were actually upland plover and not other shore
birds, as I proved by ordering them on various occasions. Once
my waiter brought two to show me that had been plucked and
cleaned, but were still uncooked. The price charged for a portion
was a peso and thirty or forty centavos, about 65 cents in our
currency. I was told that the birds were so scarce that they were
secured only by those gunners familiar with places where the
upland plover alighted when in migration.
Two were seen near Ezeiza, Buenos Aires, on March 2; at Guamini,
Buenos Aires, two were recorded in northward flight, high
in the air on March 3, and two more on March 4. At Tucuman,
Tucuman, five were heard early in the evening of April 1 as they
passed over the city traveling due north during a slow rain accompanied
by heavy mist. On the night of April 5 under similar con-
ditions an extensive flight of shore birds began at a quarter of 10
and continued until half past 11. During this period* J. L. Peters,
with whom I was traveling at the time, and I identified the call
of the upland plover from 38 individuals. The birds were in company
with yellowlegs, solitary sandpipers, and a few golden plover.
How many passed unheard in the darkness there was no way to
know. The calling of these birds when in northward migration
was a phenomenon of common knowledge in Tucuman during that
season in the year, but all commented upon the fact that the birds
seemed to have decreased greatly in abundance in recent years.
In conclusion I may say that while the upland plover was recorded
on various occasions this took place when the birds Avere in
flight and that though special search was made I was not fortunate
enough to discover an area where the birds were in residence. As,
like the Eskimo curlew, a species that I did not meet, the Bartramian
sandpiper inhabits the drier uplands it is i^robable that difference
in ecological conditions due to intensive cultivation and grazing
have wrought such great changes in the more primitive conditions
found on the pampa in its original state that the birds are unable
to adjust themselves to them and have been slowly crowded out,
where other destruction has not overtaken them.
ACTITIS MACULARIA (Linnaeus)
Tringa macularm Linnaeus, Syst. Nat., ed. 12, vol. 1, 17G6, p. 249.
(Pennsylvania.)
On October 25, 1920, near the mouth of the Rio Ajo below Lavalle,
Buenos Aires, I saw the familiar form of a spotted sandpiper teeter-
ing on a projection at the base of a cut bank of clay. The bird
proved to be an immature female. The species had been taken once