4.20 BRITISH BIRDS. 
Turkestan migrate to West Turkestan in winter, occasionally straying as 
far as the Kirghiz steppes, between the Volga and the Ural rivers. In 
mild seasons the birds breeding in Dauria winter in the northern borders 
of the desert of Gobi, in Mongolia, where a few remain to breed, but in 
severe seasons migrate south of this desert and sometimes reach North 
China. 
The interest attaching to Pallas’s Sand-Grouse in the eyes of the British 
ornithologist rivals that with which the Bohemian Waxwing is regarded. 
Both species have visited our islands in great numbers; but the Waxwing 
always appears in autumn, whereas thé Sand-Grouse chooses spring for its 
visits. The Waxwings are driven from their usual winter-quarters by 
exceptionally heavy falls of snow, which bury their food-supply ; whilst we 
may imagine that the Sand-Grouse, impelled to migrate by their hereditary 
instincts to the summer home of their youth, are sometimes forced in late 
and stormy springs either to breed in their winter-quarters or to seek new 
breeding-grounds in milder climates. It is possible, however, that the 
remarkable visits of the Sand-Grouse to Western Europe may have been 
only the result of blunders in the direction of migration; but the dates of 
their visits suggest the idea that they had visited or attempted to visit their 
usual breeding-grounds, and, finding their progress eastwards barred by 
cold or snow, had changed their course. Most of the recorded visits of 
these birds to Europe are in May, and the great invasion in 1863 reached 
our shores during the last half of May ; but Radde says that they usually 
arrive at their breeding-grounds at Tarei-Nor*, in the extreme south of 
Siberia, before the end of March. On the day that the first flock arrived 
he states that the thermometer only reached 37° at midday, and went down 
to 24° (nearly 30° below freezing-point!) at night. He found eggs in the 
middle of April, and saw young birds in the middle of May. They make 
no nest, but merely scratch a shallow hollow, about 5 inches across, in the 
salt-impregnated soil, though in some cases a little grass or a few sprigs of 
a saline plant are placed round the margin. ‘Three is the usual number 
of eggs, though it is said that four are occasionally found. They are 
remarkably elongated in shape and are scarcely at all pyriform, in this 
respect resembling the eggs of the Pigeons. In their colour, which is 
strictly protective, they resemble much more the eggs of the Plovers, 
especially the Ring-Plovers. The ground-colour varies from olive-buff to 
brownish buff, the latter being the most common. They are generally 
pretty evenly, but not very profusely, spotted with overlying markings of 
dark brown, and with paler and greyer underlying markings; these spots 
* Tarei-Nor, or the lake of Tarei, is situated in the middle of the steppe of Kerbon, 
which lies due south of Nertchinsk, a town famous (or, rather, infamous) as the centre of 
the gold- and silver-mines in which the poor Russian exiles are condemned to work. 
