In North-West Canada. 65 



wandered to the lake to drink, and had probably been attack- 

 ed by wolves and devoured. It appeared to have only lain 

 there four or live years, as the skeleton was in a good state of 

 preservation. We took out the baskets from the buckboard ; 

 these we had brought purposely to take back the eggs we had 

 collected yesterday, and on walking along the beach towards the 

 place where the avosets' and terns' eggs were buried, we flushed 

 a spotted sandpiper otf its nest and four eggs, and soon after- 

 wards John shot a buff- breasted sandpiper and a marbled god- 

 wit. The buff-breasted sandpiper, no doubt, nests in this dis- 

 trict, as it certainly does on the banks of the North Saskatche- 

 wan. A set of four eggs in my collection, collected at Prince 

 Albert on June 9th, 1889, may be described as follows : Shape, 

 pointedly pyriform ; ground colour, greyish clay, boldly spot- 

 ted with umber brown, and shell markings of neutral tint. 

 The markings are so heavy at the butt end of the egg as to 

 almost conceal the ground. The nest was a slight depression 

 in the ground, lined with a few blades of grass. The eggs of 

 this species are not unlike some varieties of the European dun- 

 lin, but they are smaller, and the ground colour is paler and 

 clay -coloured, whereas the ground colour of the dunlin is 

 greenish, or olive buff. The eggs of the buff-breasted sand- 

 piper average in size 1.45x1.05. 



Our next find was a clutch of four Wilson's phalaropes. As 

 usual, the bird stumbled off the nest just in front of my feet. 

 The nest was built in the centre of a tuft of grass, and the four 

 eggs were boldly spotted with blackish brown on a clay 

 ground. John shot a pair of Wilson's phalaropes, and also a 

 northern phalarope ; both species were numerous about this 

 place. The shore of the lake was stony, with tufts of grass 

 growing amongst the stones, and this seemed to suit the phala- 

 ropes and sandpipers. There were two or three other species 

 of small sandpipers, which I could not identify, as we were 

 not successful in obtaining specimens. I have not the slightest 

 doubt that several species of the rarer sandpipers, supposed to 

 only breed within the Arctic circle, remain to nest amongst 

 these lakes, which are numerous. From here northward 

 E 



