STINT 



1 1 



dunlin (see page 123), from which it may be distinguished by its 

 inferior size. The secondary quills in the stint are, however, brown 

 in place of partially white ; and in the summer-dress the white breast 

 has no black patch, but is tinged with chestnut on the sides. In 

 winter the upper-parts are greyish brown, and the white under-parts 

 •tinged with grey, in place of buff in the dunlin. Young birds in first 

 plumage resemble the adults in summer, but have the wing-coverts 

 margined with chestnut, except in the case of the greater coverts, 

 while the scapulars are mostly 

 bordered with white (in place of 

 chestnut), and the breast is un- 

 spotted. The chick is somewhat 

 more richly coloured than that of 

 the dunlin, and has the legs 

 darker. 



The present species is usually 

 designated the little stint, but 

 since it is apparently the bird 

 to which the name stint is alone 

 properly applicable, while there is 

 a smaller representative of the 

 group which occasionally visits 

 the British Isles, it. seems prefer- 

 able to discard the prefix except 

 in cases where its use is essential 

 in order to distinguish the species 

 from its immediate relatives. 

 The breeding-range of the stint 

 extends from the open Arctic stint. 



lands of the Kola Peninsula, on 



the east side of Lapland, across northern Russia and the adjacent islands 

 in the Arctic Ocean to the tundra of northern Siberia at least as far 

 eastward as the neighbourhood of the Taimur Peninsula ; while in 

 winter the bird migrates to Africa and southern Asia as far east as 

 India and Ceylon, where it is abundant in suitable localities. To the 

 British Islands, where it is much more abundant in the south-eastern 

 districts of England than in the north and west (in the latter of which 

 it is practically unknownj, the stint is a spring and autumn visitor, 

 making its appearance, in common with so many other waders, much 

 more frequently in the latter than in the former season. In Scotland 

 it is rare, while to Ireland it is an autumn-visitor in small numbers, 



