VOL. IX.] LAPLAND BUNTLNG ON YENESEL 237 



Birds flushed at this season M'ould allow themselves 

 almost to be trodden on before they would take wing, 

 and when they rose they did so sluggishly. They left 

 the marshes altogether at this time and were to be found 

 chiefly up on the dry tundra where the slopes were covered 

 M'ith creeping birch and ^^'hortle. 



Migration began about the 17th of August, by which 

 date most of the young birds disappeared. Birds seen 

 at the end of the month ^Yere almost all adults, and 

 appeared singly or in pairs, never in flocks, but whether 

 these were the birds which had bred in the district or 

 were passengers from further north it is impossible to say. 

 On September 1st after a prolonged south-easterly gale, 

 I flushed about a dozen adult Lapland Buntings which 

 were lying closely in the long cotton grass that fringes 

 the beaches of the Yenesei. These birds, which at that 

 late date must have been about to move southwards, 

 even if they were not already on passage, were all 

 solitary ; and a few days later, when I noted the species 

 for the last time at Nosonovsky Ostrov (200 versts to 

 the sovith) each individual was by itself, unlike the 

 Wheatears which were present in some numbers, and 

 always in societies. These details may be worth recording 

 as bearing out the statement made in the British Bird 

 Book that this species is a soHtary migrant, although it 

 is also mentioned there that a flock of 40-50 was recorded 

 from the Flannans in 1904, and one of 100 from Flam- 

 borough in 1893. Mr. Eagle-Clarke {Studies in Bird 

 Migration, Vol. II., p. 55) remarks that at Fair Isle he 

 has observed old and young migrating in company. I 

 only once saw a Lapp Bunting in the " act of migi-ating " 

 — that is to my knowledge, and that was on August 4th, 

 when I noticed an adult crossing the Yenesei River from 

 west to east about twenty miles below Golchika. It 

 was passing with a bounding Linnet-like flight just above 

 the tops of the waves, and not for the first time I reaUsed 

 the truth of Mr. Eagle -Clarke's observation as to the 

 difficulty of picking vip small birds at sea, for it was 



