236^ SEA-BIRDS 



for the winter of 1896-97 in his camp in the south of the archipelago 

 (at Cape Flora on Northbrook Island), only saw one in the whole of his 

 three years stay — an adult on 5 July 1897. 



After Nansen had parted from the Fram its crew saw rosy gulls in 

 the pack several times between 18 July and 11 August 1895. The 

 furthest north record was at 84^41 N. So by the end of the century, 

 then, it was clear that the species inhabited the pack north of Spits- 

 bergen and Franz Josef Land. Further contemporary evidence of this 

 came tragically to light in 1930, when the last diaries of S. A. Andree 

 (who attempted the Pole by balloon) were discovered with his body 

 on White Island, off the east of North-East Land, between it and Franz 

 Josef Land. The log of the last struggles of Andree and his two compan- 

 ions over the pack from their wrecked balloon two hundred miles to 

 the northward contains at least fifteen and probably seventeen records 

 of rosy gulls, seen between 25 July and 30 August 1897, from 190 to 

 120 miles north of White Island. 



The secret of the breeding place was uncovered in the summer of 

 1905, when S. A. Buturlin collected thirty-eight skins and thirty-six 

 eggs of Rhodostethia rosea in the delta of the Kolyma River, which flows 

 into the Polar Basin in eastern Siberia, east of the delta of the Lena 

 River. He established that the mysterious rosy gull nested, not on 

 the tundra, but in low marshy places, among alder-scrub, in the sub- 

 alpine and wooded zones of the lower reaches of the rivers Alazeya, 

 Indigirka and Kolyma, sometimes nearly a hundred miles south of 

 the tree-line, and that it probably also nested westwards from this 

 district to Swjatoi Nos, the promontory of Siberia opposite the New 

 Siberian Islands. Buturlin's description (1906) of the rosy gulls nesting 

 in the boggy moorland of this lonely country is a most vivid docu- 

 ment, and well depicts the unexpected habitat of this extraordinary 

 bird, which it shares with Hornemann's redpoll and the snow-bunting, 

 the white-tailed eagle, the willow-grouse, the vega herring-gull and 

 the arctic tern, the pectoral sandpiper, curlew-sandpiper, dunlin, 

 grey and red-necked phalaropes, snipe, Asiatic golden plover, grey 

 plover, ruff, the long-tailed duck, the white-front, the thick-billed 

 bean-goose, and Bewick's swan, amongst others. 



Perhaps this huge area of the Siberian wastes is the sole reservoir 

 of the rosy gull, which appears so promptly each September in the 

 Eurasiatic arctic islands and on the Alaskan coast? If new breeding- 

 grounds are still to be found, they are surely in other alder-scrub delta- 

 floods of Siberian rivers, or perhaps (the possibility seems rather remote) 



