NUTCRACKER. 585 
the sailors’ room half a dozen were busy picking amongst the refuse 
thrown out by the cook. Their tameness was quite absurd. They allowed 
us to go within three feet of them; and sometimes they even permitted us 
to touch them with a stick. They are wonderfully sociable birds. At 
one time I counted as many as eight in one tree together. Whilst the 
sailors were working at the ship, cutting away the ice all round her, there 
were frequently two or three Nutcrackers in different parts of the rigging, 
apparently watching the operations with great interest. They seem to be 
well aware of the fact that scraps of food are always to be picked up where 
men are congregated. Sometimes the Ostyak children shot one with a 
bow and arrow; and now and then one was caught by the dogs. On the 
bushes round the houses they allowed us to approach within four or five 
feet of them, and when disturbed moved to the nearest tree with a peculiar 
slow, undulating, Jay-like flight. In the forest they flew from tree to 
tree, screaming at each other. They have two distinct notes, both harsh 
enough. One, probably the call-note, is a little prolonged and slightly 
plaintive—a sort of kray, kray; the other is louder and more energetic, 
and appears to be the alarm-note—a kr-kr-kr, almost as grating to the ear 
as the note of a Corncrake. I was anxious to obtain a series of Nut- 
eracker’s eggs; so all through May, whilst the snow was deep on the 
ground, I carefully protected them, and fed them with the bodies of the 
birds which I skinned. I even took the trouble to cut up the bodies into 
small pieces for them, and was delighted to find how eagerly they devoured 
this food; but they treated me in a most ungrateful manner. They con- 
tinued to be abundant until about the 7th of June, when the snow was 
pretty well melted from the ground ; they then vanished altogether; and, 
with the exception of a couple of birds I picked up (one on the 25th of 
June in full moult), I saw no more of them until they reappeared in flocks 
migrating south in August. The breeding-season of the Nutcracker in the 
Arctic regions is evidently June and July—at least ten weeks later than 
in Central Europe. Where they retired to breed I was unable to discover ; 
but it was doubtless on the higher ground which forms the watershed 
between the Obb and the Yenesay, and between the latter river and the 
Lena, far from the haunts of men—Russian or Ostyak, who all come 
down to the great rivers to fish as soon as the snow melts and the ice 
breaks up. 
The Nutcracker, like most other members of the Crow family, is almost 
omnivorous. Caterpillars, wasps, and insects of various sorts have been 
taken from its stomach. Its favourite food is the seeds of the Siberian 
cedar, which it extracts from the cone with its bill very dexterously. It 
also eats nuts, acorns, berries, and even land-shells of various kinds. It 
has also the reputation of robbing the nests of other birds of their eggs 
and young. 
