25) 
were, even up to within the last few years, only published a couple 
of short notes made by Middendorff during forty years on the 
Taimyr peninsula in North Siberia (about 74° N. lat.).* 
Here in Norway it seems, however, on the whole to nest only 
occasionally. It generally elects to take up its abode in com- 
panies of from one to some few pairs, in the middle of colonies 
of its nearest relation, 7. temminckt, and its behaviour during 
the nesting season is almost exactly like theirs. It seeks its 
food at the same feeding-places by the swamps on the coast ; 
and by its extremely anxious demeanour, when one approaches 
its nest, it discloses as artlessly as its companions, where the four 
prettily-pencilled eggs, so highly valued by oologists, he amongst 
the heather. The nest is even more skilfully constructed than 
its relation’s, and is lined at the bottom with a thick layer of 
fine grass bents, almost like that of a pipit. 
During the nesting season this bird also performs a play, which 
is executed much in the same way as with the preceding species ; 
but besides that, the male, and sometimes the female, utters a 
delicate twittering song from the ground in proximity to the 
nest. Here also it is the male on whom the burden of rearing 
the young is essentially incumbent. 
We pause at length by the largest of the pools of water, 
which glitter among the cloudberry flowers and the layers of 
turf. Numberless gulls make their toilet here, as they prefer for 
this purpose the fresh water to the sea. Pair after pair of the 
Red-throated Diver (Colymbus septentrionalis) lie scattered over the 
water, or exercise their two tiny brownish-black young in diving 
in the small pools of water in the neighbouring swamp. On this 
island, where they are protected, this species, otherwise so httle 
gregarious during the breeding season, has joined together into 
small colonies, a thing which has hardly ever been observed 
elsewhere: and when the author, in 1872, visited the island for 
the first time, there were at least thirty pairs nesting in its 
different tarns. All these pools, whose water is black and mixed 
* In June, 1872, on this very island, the author met with several pairs of this 
species settled, and under circumstances which plainly showed that they bred here. 
But in 1875, as is known, Seebohm and Harvie Brown first found both eggs and 
young in the Gebet Tundra, near the mouth of the Petchora. In 1880 the author 
found several nests in two different localities on the shores of Porsanger Fjord. 
