516 COllVUS COllAX. 



^ 2775. Two.—FsdYoe, 1852. From Sysselmand Miiller, 

 1853. 



§ 2776. aSz>.— Aiti-jarwi-pahta, West Finmark, 8 May, 1854. 

 " J. W. ipse." 



Taken by myself on my way back from Norway, a mile or so 

 before we came to the Finnish frontier, where I entered an enemy's 

 land \ Pahta ^ means " rock/' and the little cliff where the nest was 

 stands at the southern end of the lake of Aiti, on the east side. I 

 drove a little out of the track to it, expecting there might be some- 

 thing, and as we got to the edge of the lake the old birds came 

 croaking over us. Ludwig soon waded through the snow to the nest, 

 which was in a corner most easily accessible to man or fox, and 

 not more than eight or ten feet from the level ground. I then 

 followed Ludwig. The nest was made as usual of sticks, and thickly 

 lined with reindeer's hair, amongst which were fragments of woollen 

 cloth gathered, as our Lapp guide said, on the spots whence cotas 

 had been moved. The Ravens took their loss tolerably patiently ; 

 but followed us overhead a short way. 1 packed the eggs in a little 

 basket I had had for coffee-cups. Ludwig blew them at Palojoki, 

 and they have reached Muonioniska in safety — difficult travelling 

 for eggs though it be in a pulka. They were a little sat on. 



p. 27) gave the supposed species a systematic name, C. leucophceus, besides figuring 

 it (Galerie des Oiseaux, pi. 100) and enlarging on its ferocity ; though, no doubt 

 unknown to him, Landt in 1800 (Forsog til en Beskrivelse over Fseroerne, p. 244 ; 

 Eno-1. transl. p. 220) had pointed out that black and pied birds paired together, and 

 the youno- of either colour might be found in the same nest. The same opinion 

 was as forcibly expressed by Graba in 18-30 (Tagebuch gefiihrt auf einer Reise nach 

 Faro p. 51). In his paper on the Birds of those islands (Contributions to Ornitho- 

 logy, 1850, p. 110) Mr. Wolley wrote : " I saw the black and white variety which 

 has been called a species under the name of C. leucophceus ; but two were shewn 

 to me alive which came out of the same nest with purely black ones ; they were 

 marked irre"-ularly and differently from each other, and had none of the characters 

 of a species." A dozen years afterwards Sysselmand Miiller wrote to the same 

 effect (FEeroernes Fuglefauna, p. 13), and about the same time he was good enough 

 to send me some specimens, completely bearing out Mr. Wolley's opinion ; but 

 when I last saw my good friend (29 June, 1894) he told me he was afraid that all 

 the pied Eavens had been killed ofl^". — Ed.j 



1 [Mr. Wolley had crossed the frontier. War with Russia had been proclaimed 

 during his excursion to Alten and Hammerfest. — Ed.] 



^ [More correctly spelt, I believe, Pakte, the Lapp word for "clifT," but the /.; 

 seems to be silent.— Ed.] 



