Part 61

TURNSTONE

HABITS

The above species is cosmopolitan; it has a circumpolar breeding range, and its migrations extend over nearly all of the Northern Hemisphere and a large part of the Southern. It has been split into two, or possibly three, geographical races. In the author’s opinion only two races should be recognized; the Palaearctic form, interpres, averages slightly larger, and is decidedly darker, the black predominating over the rufous on the upper parts; the Nearctic form, morinella, averages slightly smaller, is decidedly lighter, the rufous predominating on the upper parts; these two races are well marked and are generally recognized. The Pacific race has been described under the name oahuensis, from specimens taken on Oahu Island in the Hawaiian group. It is supposed to breed in Alaska and spend the winter in the Hawaiian and other Pacific islands. It seems to be strictly intermediate, both in size and color, between interpres and morinella. Some of the best authorities have not recognized it in nomenclature, which seems to be a wise course. For the purpose of this life history the species as a whole will be considered.

Spring.--The northward migration of the ruddy turnstone through the United States is accomplished mainly during May, but many linger along through the first week in June. I have seen turnstones in Louisiana as late as June 17 and 23, but some that I shot were immature birds, apparently 1 year old, which probably would not breed that season. Arthur T. Wayne (1910) has seen high plumaged birds in South Carolina on June 11 and 12, which were doubtless late migrants; but he says that birds in immature or winter plumage are seen in June more frequently than adults. These latter illustrate the well-established fact that many shore birds do not attain their full plumage and do not breed during their first year, but remain within their winter ranges or far south of their breeding ranges all summer.

Many observers have stated that turnstones do not migrate in large flocks in the spring, but I have seen some very large flocks on Cape Cod containing several hundred. On the coast of New Jersey during the latter part of May, 1927, we saw a wonderful flight of this and other shore birds; on the 20th we counted 3,600 turnstones, on the 26th 4,500, on the 27th 5,000, and on the 28th 7,000; many of these were in immense flocks of this species only, but more often they were associated in large flocks with black-bellied plovers; one enormous flock of the two species was estimated to contain 3,500 birds.

The main migration route is along the sea coast. Migrants have been known to reach Massachusetts as early as May 1, and my latest date is June 5; but the main flight comes during the latter half of May. Dr. W. Elmer Ekblaw tells me that it reaches its breeding grounds in northwestern Greenland during the first week in June.

There is a regular migration northward through the interior, but in much smaller numbers. Pierce Brodkorb and Frank Grasett give me dates for northeastern Illinois from April 30 to June 18. We collected specimens in Nelson County, N. Dak., on June 5, and at Lake Winnipegosis, Manitoba, on June 1 and 2; but we did not record the species at all during the two seasons spent in southwestern Saskatchewan. Prof. William Rowan tells me that it is rare in his section of Alberta. The route is evidently northward from Manitoba through the Athabaska-Mackenzie region. Samuel F. Rathbun has sent me the following notes on the former abundance of turnstones in Manitoba:

In that Province we spent the greater part of the spring and summer of 1889, and on one occasion went to Lake Manitoba driving as directly as possible across what was then an unsettled country. We clambered up one of the dunes and looked over its top, and right in front of us and up and down the beach almost as far as could be seen, were countless numbers of shore birds. On the sands nearly all of these were in constant motion, while over the surface of the lake flocks were flying to and fro. By far the greater number of the birds were turnstones and the flocks of these were always very large. I hesitate to give my estimate of the number seen, but I made many counts and forming a rough guess from these judged at the time that there must have been somewhere near eight or ten thousand of the turnstones. And I have always believed this estimate to be somewhere near correct. This was on the 30th of May and it may have been that we were fortunate to have happened to witness the height of the movement of these birds.

The ruddy turnstone is a rather uncommon migrant on the Pacific coast in April and May. Mr. Rathbun says in his notes that it--

appears to be a regular spring migrant along the ocean coast of Washington, first being seen in early May. The earlier birds seem to arrive in small numbers, to be followed by flocks of fair size, but at no time are the turnstones as common as are most of the other species of shore birds that migrate along the coast.

From its winter home in Australia the turnstone makes an early start for its long flight over the ocean; W. B. Alexander tells me that his latest record is of a pair seen April 25, 1914, on the estuary of the Lost River on the south coast of western Australia. The Pacific form of the turnstone has been named oahuensis from a specimen taken on the island where Honolulu is situated. The birds leave the Hawaiian Islands in May and probably make a 2,000-mile flight over the Pacific Ocean to the Commander and Aleutian Islands. Dr. Leonhard Stejneger (1885) says that they make their appearance in the Commanders “early in May (in 1883 the first ones were observed on the 7th), and the beach, especially on the north shore of Bering Island, fairly swarms with them. In June they disappear, and only a few remain during the summer.” In his notes from Hooper Bay, Alaska, H. B. Conover says: “On May 15 Du Fresne shot the first bird of this species. He had found it sitting humped up on a log showing through the snow. The next day a pair was seen, and after that date they were noticed constantly. On May 28 the migration still must have been going on, as a flock of about 20 was seen mixed with 6 golden plover.”

Courtship.--Doctor Ekblaw has sent me the following notes:

The ruddy turnstone is almost if not quite as common as the ringed plover along the beaches and about the gravelly moraines and terraces of northwest Greenland. It comes to the land the first week in June, frequenting the drifts of kelp along the shore when the ice foot has melted away. There they probe about the shells and seaweed, turning the long drifts over to a depth of 3 inches. Where they have worked, the shore looks as if a drove of tiny pigs had rooted about.

They begin mating as soon as they arrive, and many a bitter struggle and amorous courtship takes place among these birds during the first two weeks of June. The males outnumber the females, so the rivalry is keen. As the lowering sun of the day sinks nearest the midnight horizon the wooing antics are at the height. Frequently two males pursue the same female, seeking to win her favor, the while they are combating one another for the advantage. In giddy, reckless flight they sweep back and forth along the shore, rarely rising more than 3 feet above the beach, usually but a foot. When alighted the pursuit is just as eager, the female racing about to escape the insistent attentions of the males, the males eagerly pursuing her and struggling between themselves for supremacy. The more pugnacious usually wins out, though the other never gives up hope.

The Rev. F. C. R. Jourdain contributes the following notes on the subject:

A study of the published records of the breeding habits of the turnstone discloses the fact that practically nothing has ever been written on the courtship and song of this species. The only apparent exception is a passage by A. Trevor-Battye (1895), who says: “This lovely bird has a far more elaborate song than that of any wader I know. You really may call it a song. I put it down at the time as chewah, chewah, chewecki, ki-ki-ki kee kee, and he sings it con amore from any little mound.” My first experience with the turnstone dates back to 1921, when with Mr. A. H. Paget Wilkes we found the nests of some 19 pairs in Spitsbergen. It was then late in the breeding season; every pair had incubated eggs or young, but directly one arrived within range of a breeding pair the cock would fly out to meet us and greet us with his little challenge song. As a rule attempts to describe the notes of birds by means of letters are chiefly remarkable for their discrepancies, but if Mr. Paget Wilkes’s version of the “attack note” is compared with that of Mr. Trevor-Battye, the resemblance is striking, tche-wick ... tsche-wick, tche-wi-i-i-i-i-i-ck. Obviously the two “songs” are the same, yet we heard this challenge daily from birds far advanced in incubation and even with newly hatched young. It continued as long as we remained in the neighborhood of the nest, and was sometimes repeated in a weaker form by the female. When the young were being brooded by the male and the female was on guard this challenge note was uttered by her. There is, of course, a strong element of challenge in all bird song, and the turnstone is a born fighter. No foe is too formidable to be attacked and driven off. It is most amusing to see a male chasing a bird ten times as big as himself and returning complacently to his sentry duty until the approach of another probable enemy brings him again to the attack.

There is little doubt that all the “singing” males met with by Trevor-Battye were really breeding birds defending the territories and, as they fondly imagined, driving him away. Of course the cheery little chirrup of the turnstone has no claim to musical excellence in spite of Trevor-Battye’s exaggerated praise; no one could possibly compare it to the sweet wild notes of the curlew or even the flutelike notes of the purple sandpiper. Apparently in this species the fighting instinct has replaced the tendency to display on the wing before the female; and while many other waders utter musical notes during the love flight the turnstone reserves his for the attack.

Nesting.--Comparatively few nests of the ruddy turnstone have ever been found, as the bird nests in the far north, where few ornithologists have been. A set of three eggs in my collection, taken by Capt. Joseph Bernard on Taylor Island, Victoria Land, on August 1, 1917, possibly a second laying, was in a hollow on the tundra. MacFarlane found only two sets on the lower Anderson River, which were precisely similar to those of the other waders, consisting of a few withered leaves placed in a depression in the ground, each containing four eggs. Eggs collected by Rev. A. R. Hoare at Point Hope, Alaska, were laid “in depressions on mossy ridges of the tundra.” Herbert W. Brandt has sent me the following notes on the nesting habits of these birds in Alaska:

At Hooper Bay the ruddy turnstone like the indigenous plovers is an open-nesting bird and it depends for concealment of its eggs upon the similarity of the shell coloration to its surroundings. Near a limpid pool in the low-rolling dunes the bird makes a shallow, circular depression in the brownish green, velvetlike moss and this it lines, haphazardly, with a few moss stems and often with small crisp leaves of low-creeping woody plants. The range of measurements of five nests is: Inside diameter, 3¾ to 4½ inches; inside depth, 1 to 1½ inches; and depth over all is 1 to 1¾ inches. The pied parents follow the habits of the open-nesting birds, for they are wild and unapproachable while breeding; so that in spite of its exposed location the nest is anything but easy to find. Incubation patches were present on both sexes and they did not employ, to lure the intruder from the nesting area, the usual wounded tactics of the other shore birds.

In the Eastern Hemisphere numerous nests have been found and considerable has been published on the subject. Henry J. Pearson (1904), during his three summers in Russian Lapland, found several nests of the turnstone. On June 13, 1899, on Little Heno Island, he found a nest with four fresh eggs on a low sand spit. “The nest was placed in a patch of dwarf sallow, 10 inches high, and near the edge of a bank, the slight depression being lined with a few dry grasses and dead leaves.” Another nest was found on June 27 on Great Heno. After watching the bird in vain for a long time on “a bare stretch of peat, with scarcely a scrap of vegetation and full of puffin holes,” they returned the next day and flushed the turnstone out of a puffin hole; “and there was a nest 18 inches from the mouth, containing three eggs more than half incubated; a few dead sorrel stalks had been taken in to form the nest.” On June 19, 1901, on Medveji Island, a nest was found “placed under a large overhanging shelf of peat, in such a position that the bird could slip on and off in two different directions according to that from which danger was threatened. The young were formed in the four incubated eggs.” He refers to two other nests found on a sand spit, which were “on the open ground with no protection beyond a few blades of grass.”

W. C. Hewitson (1856) found a nest on the coast of Norway on “a flat rock, bare except where here and there grew tufts of grass, or stunted juniper clinging to its surface”; the nest “was placed against a ledge of the rock, and consisted of nothing more than the drooping leaves of the juniper bush, under a creeping branch of which the eggs, four in number, were snugly concealed.”

A number of nests of the turnstone were found by the Oxford expedition to Spitsbergen, about which A. H. Paget-Wilkes (1922) has given us considerable information. He says that “in spite of the presence of large and small boulders and stones the turnstone in Spitsbergen does not lay its eggs under the shelter of this somewhat scanty cover or in the small holes or pockets in the soil, but chooses perfectly open and bare, wind-swept places for its breeding sites.” Some seven nests were found on islands and one of these is described as “a very flat depression among small stones on a small ridge of dry, red mud.” Other nests were scattered along the shore at intervals of about three-quarters of a mile; but in one place five or six pairs were nesting within a radius of half a mile. One nest was on a little island of hard mud, only three yards by two yards in a stream. The turnstones are very active and aggressive in defending their nests against the jaegers; these marauders are persistently harried, desperately attacked, and finally driven away.

Ralph Chislett (1925) gives an interesting account of finding the turnstone breeding on a Baltic isle, where the nests were hidden among the dense herbage. He says:

Against the sky, not more than 30 yards away, appearing over the top of a rise in the ground, as seen from the hiding tent, was a group of chervil flower heads. One of the turnstones, on taking wing, flew directly to these flower heads and appeared to settle in the midst of them. After giving the bird time to get settled on the eggs (I hoped) I crawled out of the tent, and keeping low was within 6 yards of the chervil clump when the turnstone took wing from a point 2 yards on the other side, repeating its cry much more meaningly than hitherto. I had been prepared to find the nest under shelter of some sort, but had not expected the eggs to be so completely hidden from view as proved to be the case here. The nest lay on the seaward side of the clump. To obtain a view for the camera, a tall chervil stalk, some leaves, and grasses had to be removed. The definite scrape was lined with bits of seaweed and dry grass stems to a depth of more than 1 inch.

Eggs.--Mr. Brandt has sent me the following good description of the turnstone’s eggs collected by his party in Alaska:

The ruddy turnstone lays four eggs and these may justly claim rank as some of the handsomest of all the delightful Hooper Bay limicoline series. They are subpyriform to ovate in shape and lie points together in the shallow nest. The shell is glossy and smooth and is quite strong. The markings seldom cover more than half the area of the eggs and in consequence the ground color is prominent. The latter is quite variable, ranging from “yellowish glaucous” to “olive buff” and even “deep olive buff.” The surface markings are usually bold and are most heavily concentrated on the larger end, but one striking type is known for its beautiful marbled effect as the spots which are large and clouded softly fade into the glossy ground color. These spots are irregular in outline and are often slightly elongate, twisting into a pronounced clockwise spiral. The usual color of the primary spots is “warm sepia,” but in the greenish setting they are “olive brown” while in the marbled type “citrine drab” is the prevailing shade. When the underlying markings are given prominence their soft tones add to the beauty of the eggs. The colors of these partially hidden ornaments range from “pale mouse gray” to “mouse gray.” The additional markings of brownish black to black are sparsely scattered over the larger part of the egg usually in the form of small spots or pen-like scratches. The vitality of the shore birds is attested by the fact that four turnstone’s eggs laid in four days weigh 2½ ounces, while the parent bird herself weighs but 3½ ounces.

Most of the turnstone’s eggs that I have seen are easily recognizable, though the distinctive features are more easily seen than described. The markings are usually quite evenly distributed and the egg well covered with them. The 12 eggs so well illustrated on Frank Poynting’s (1895) beautiful plate, all taken from European eggs, show some variations not mentioned by Mr. Brandt. The buffy ground colors range from “dark olive buff” to “olive buff”; and greenish ones from “water green” to “yellowish glaucous.” One plain-looking egg is “dark olive buff” with faint markings of a slightly darker shade. Another is “water green” with numerous, small, almost black spots, and underlying small spots of “light mouse gray.” The measurements of 100 European eggs furnished by the Rev. F. C. R. Jourdain, average 40.5 by 29.2 millimeters; the eggs showing the four extremes measure =44.5= by 30.4, 43.2 by =31.3=, =36= by 28.2 and 40.5 by =26= millimeters. Mr. Brandt’s 44 eggs, from Alaska, average slightly smaller, 39 by 28 millimeters; the extremes of his and all other American and Greenland eggs that I have measurements of fall within the limits given above for European eggs. Egg measurements would seem to indicate that Alaska birds should be referred to morinella, the smaller race.

Young.--The period of incubation does not seem to be known, but it is a well-established fact that both sexes share in this duty, as well as in the care of the young. Mr. Paget-Wilkes (1922) says: