The Quail and M.S. 265 



coming may thus be accounted for ; but the cause of their 

 departure at the season they leave us presents a con- 

 siderable difficulty. If it be said that they do not go 

 until the haus and berries are gone, and they are neces- 

 sitated to seek for food elsewhere, this would not account 

 for it unless we supposed that the north could afford 

 them a fresh and better supply, which it certainly could 

 not. 



It is, therefore, likely that they change their diet ; 

 but even then, one would imagine that it would be easier 

 for them to find their subsistence here than in the 

 northern regions to which they then proceed. 



Among the most remarkable of this class of birds who 

 find the severe weather from which others retire most 

 congenial to their wants or constitutions, may be men- 

 tioned the snow-bunting and the snow-bird. 



The former, although a bird of song, withdraws to 

 the frozen zone to breed and nurture its young. It in- 

 habits, not only Greenland, but even the dreadful 

 climate of Spitsbergen, where vegetation is almost ex- 

 tint, and where scarcely any but eryptogamous plants are 

 found. Yet these buntings are found in great flocks 

 both on the land and ice of Spitsbergen ; it is pro- 

 bable that they breed there, and it is certain that they 

 do so in Greenland, where they arrive in April, and make 

 their nests in the fissures of the rocks in May. M. 

 Temminck presents the best observations of the migratory 

 tribes thus : — ' ' The yearlings and the old birds rarely 

 travel together in these journeys, which are longer or 

 shorter as the necessity of seeking a fresh supply of food 

 in other climates obliges them to quit those places which 

 fail at certain seasons to furnish them with the means of 

 subsistence. I think I have traced the reason of this 

 separation of families, and the collection into flocks of 

 birds nearly of the same age, to a very natural cause, pro- 

 duced by the difference of the periods at which the moult 

 takes place in the old and young birds ; and this also 

 appears to be the cause that the flocks composed of adult 

 individuals migrate to a much greater distance, whether 

 in autumn, or at their return in spring, than the bands 



