50 BULLETIN 197, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



fairly long and plentiful down of a dark gray-brown color distributed 

 on the inner and outer supraorbital, occipital, humeral, ulnar, spinal, 

 femoral, and crural tracts. The inside of its mouth, as I have myself 

 noted in northern Norway, is colored a raw-flesh red without spots 

 and the flanges externally are very pale yellow. The juvenal plu- 

 mage much resembles that of the adult female in winter, but the pale 

 edgings of the feathers of the upperparts are rather smaller and more 

 buffish and the buff of the underparts more yellowish. The chin is 

 huffish white. In the first winter the male is much like the adult fe- 

 male in winter but may have the chin and throat tinged with buffish 

 pink. 



Food. — ^Like other pipits the species is mainly insectivorous. Exact 

 data are not extensive, but Jourdain (1938, vol. 1) mentions Diptera, 

 Coleoptera, etc., small worms, and in winter also fresh-water mollusks 

 and grass seeds. Haviland (1915) mentions especially mosquitoes, 

 and indeed it is difficult to see how these pests could fail to figure 

 largely in the diet of any insectivorous bird on the tundra in summer. 



Behavior. — The carriage, gait, and general behavior are those of a 

 typical pipit. It perches freely on bushes and fences or, where they 

 exist on telegraph wires and buildings and on trees. Miss Maud 

 Haviland (1915) in Siberia found it a quarrelsome bird. In winter 

 it is found in large parties and flocks, which scatter rather widely 

 over the feeding grounds. 



Voice. — The distinctive character of the call note has already been 

 mentioned. It is a comparatively full, quite musical, and rather 

 abrupt chiXj) (the "ii" sound to be pronounced like the French "u"), 

 quite different from the thin, shrill notes of the other pipits. It is used 

 both in flight or when flushed and while perched, and habitually by 

 migrants as well as on the breeding ground. A note used by breeding 

 birds which seems to be more definitely an alarm is a rather hoarse, 

 shrill tsxoeerp., and from birds chasing one another I have heard a 

 more rippling tsrvrrncp. 



The species has a pleasing song superior to that of most pipits. In 

 Lapland I found it to be built up of three main types of component, 

 which, so far as such sounds can be represented crudely by words, might 

 be rendered as twee (repeated about four times, shrill and prolonged), 

 irrrrrrrrr (a little bubbling trill) , and tioizz-wizz-wizz-wizz (more sib- 

 ilant and usually repeated several times, thus: twee-twee-tioee-twee^ 

 trrrrrrrrr., tioizz-wizz-wizz-wizz., timzz-wizz-wizz-wizz.^ twizz-wizz- 

 wizz-ioizz. When the song is given from a post or bush it may consist 

 of a single such sequence, but the fullest and best song is given in the air, 

 as the bird rises and then parachutes down again with wings half spread 

 and tail fanned. It is then more prolonged, consisting of much the 

 same sequence of three main phrases or types of note repeated two or 



