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March/April 2006 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Feature: Titanic ice In-depth: On ice Feature: Dance of the dunlins Feature: Off the rails Feature: Being caribou The Inside Story Editor’s Notebook Reverberations Explorer À la carte Mosaic

A dense flock of dunlins explodes into flight on a winter morning over the tidal flats of the southern coast of British Columbia. Drawing together into a defensive formation, the little shorebirds roll across the horizon like a giant ball. They alternately flash their white undersides and dark backs, perfectly coordinated like a semaphore alarm signal to sandpipers far and wide. Through binoculars, I glimpse a larger bird among them, their deadly enemy, a peregrine falcon.

Closer to where I am standing, thousands of dunlins run over the mud flats, hungrily following the ebbing tide. Suddenly, they, too, flush into the sky and coalesce into an agitated column. High above them, black and menacing in the grey overcast, the falcon wings back and forth.

The raptor makes one or two feints, denting the flock, each time towering back up just as steeply as he has fallen. Then he cartwheels, tucks in his wings and drops like a stone to collide with the trailing end of the column. Several dunlins, having narrowly dodged his attack, fall out and splash into the water. Instantly, the falcon doubles back and seizes one, carrying it off to an inland plucking post.

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