92 PEASANT LIFE IN UST-ZYLMA 



days. By the 25th of May the great river was entirely 

 free. Summer had come as suddenly as usual, and the 

 people were hard at work ; the women and children 

 carting manure on the land, using sledges, although the 

 snow had disappeared except where it lay in drifts ; the 

 men breaking up the ground with an antediluvian-looking 

 plough, sowing corn broadcast, or harrowing in the seed 

 with a wooden-toothed harrow. 



A good deal of building was also going on. The 

 year before the peasants had made large earnings out of 

 the fisheries, and were now spending larger sums than 

 usual in erecting houses. We found the demand for 

 labour was great, and wages were high. Few men could 

 be got under 10s. per week. We spent our days, as 

 usual, on the look-out for the arrival of new migratory 

 birds, in watching the habits of those at hand, and in 

 adding to our collection. We saw no snow-buntings 

 after the i8th, and the merlins disappeared with them. 

 Nor did we see any gulls after the 21st. The shore- 

 larks and the Lapland buntings were also growing scarce. 

 Occasionally small flocks of them would appear in the 

 fields behind the house, sometimes so busy feeding as to 

 allow us to approach very near them. 



On the 2 1 St of May we were surprised to find a pair 

 of wheatears. In England they are the earliest birds of 

 passage to arrive in spring, but of course they winter 

 farther south than the snow-buntings and shore-larks, 

 and we might reasonably expect them to arrive later in 

 such northerly breeding-grounds. 



On the 22nd we added another familiar British 

 migrant to our list, the tree-pipit, a bird which usually 

 arrives rather late with us. A more important addition 

 to our list was, however, the Siberian chiffchaff {P/iy//o- 

 scopus tristis, Blyth), a little warbler which frequented 



