A Mississippi newspaper recently told its subscribers that "The flying horse is an odd creature with a long brown body about two feet long, its tail is bushy and hangs down like a horse's switch, with wings close to the body like a flying squirrel. Its head is shaped like an animal's and it carries its neck in a curve. The shrill cry of the flying horse is like the neigh of a yearling colt and its shrieks may be heard for a long distance." A creature like that described would be more than odd; it would be miraculous.

The story like most, however, outlandish as it may seem, has something at the bottom and in this case it is the cry of a bird. That bird is the so-called upland plover, one of the calls of which resembles the whinnying of a horse. Imaginative observers, as the news item reveals, have merely supplied what they have deemed appropriate details as to the appearance of a flying creature that makes a sound like a horse. The bird in point is one of the wading or shore birds that has departed from the general habits of its tribe and taken to grasslands. There it was once abundant but hunting and encroachment upon its range have so reduced it in numbers that fear of its impending extermination is warranted.

It is a beautiful and graceful as well as a useful inhabitant of upland pastures and prairies, but like so many other forms of wild life has been forced by man to give way. In the days of its abundance several names were applied to it by hunters, as upland, field, or prairie plover, prairie pigeon, prairie snipe, and turkey plover. It was the "papabotte" of Louisiana epicures, and the wild mare, flying colt, or flying horse of those who were especially impressed by its peculiar cry. This call as described by Elliott Coues is "a very loud, prolonged cry, sounding more like the whistling of the wind than a bird's voice; the wild sound, which is strangely mournful, is frequently heard in the night and is, I think, one of the most remarkable outcries I have ever heard."

O. W. Knight, who worked on the birds of Maine, spoke of it as "a long, weird, mournful but mellow, rolling whistle like that of autumn wind," and E. H. Forbush in his grand work on the birds of Massachusetts, says "except for the wail of the wind, there is nothing else like it in Nature." As we have seen, however, others think there is something else like it, and as we hear it some warm spring night, drifting down from a lonely bird, which though it may be in a flood of migrants, is yearning for its kind, has a quality seeming so strange for any aerial voyager, that we are not inclined to be severely critical of those who would call it, so truly imaginatively, the flying horse.