BIRDS OF ICELAND 19 



Resident, and common : some individuals seem to 

 leave the country in winter, so Grondal calls it a bird 

 of passage. It is not unlikely that they all do, and 

 their places are taken for the winter by others from 

 Greenland and Spitzbergen. 



They frequent chiefly stony or rocky places, but in 

 winter are found round farms and houses, like sparrows 

 in England. Their nests are placed in a crevice of 

 rock, under a boulder, in a stone-heap, or stone wall. 

 They are large, loose, and untidy, like a Yellow-Ammer's, 

 and are made of moss, roots, and grass, with a lining 

 of finer grass, and some ptarmigan's feathers or sheep's 

 wool. The eggs are five in number, sometimes six, 

 and are white, slightly tinted with grey-purple, spotted 

 and blotched with umber-brown and black ; the latter 

 colour has a tinge of purple in it. I have an excep- 

 tional clutch which are white, thickly spotted with 

 light red-brown. Young birds have sometimes left 

 the nest by the end of June, but fresh eggs may be 

 found till the end of that month. The male Snow- 

 bunting, a very handsome bird in breeding dress, has 

 a very pretty note — a liquid and long-repeated warble, 

 sometimes uttered when the bird is perched on a 

 boulder, sometimes on the wing. In the latter case, 

 the cock circles round in wide curves, a yard or more 

 from the ground, occasionally pausing and hovering 

 like a Skylark, and at a distance looks like nothing 

 so much as a large black-and-white butterfly. At that 

 time of year he is snow-white except the mantle, 

 shoulder, tail, and last two-thirds of the primary quills. 



