170 TOTANUS OCHROPUS. 
TOTANUS OCHROPUS (Linneus). 
GREEN SANDPIPER. 
[Notwithstanding all his efforts, Mr. Wolley was unable to obtain any trace 
of this species in the parts of Lapland visited by himself or his collectors—though 
the most careful of them, Ludwig Knoblock, was especially sent to examine the 
valley of Kop Vand in Nordland, which we had been assured was a certain locality 
for the Green Sandpiper. Whatever might have been asserted to the contrary, 
Mr. Wolley was confident that it does not occur there, nor in any of the valleys in 
Norway, Sweden, and Finland within the Arctic Circle, and I believe this 
confidence was well grounded, since it has been confirmed by the equally negative 
evidence of more recent investigators’. On his first arrival in Lapland, being but 
little familiar with this species or the Wood-Sandpiper, he thought he had found 
it breeding about Muonioniska, and even marked some eggs accordingly, but his 
regular practice of procuring the bird from the nest, and so determining the eggs, 
enabled the mistake into which he had fallen to be corrected, for on the skins of the 
specimens he obtained being sent home and examined they proved to belong to 
Totanus glareola, which he subsequently found to be perhaps the most abundant and 
widely-spread species of the group in Lapland. Other travellers, less cautious, may 
have made the same mistake without being able to rectify it. 
I think I may also state, without fear of contradiction, that the breeding-habits 
of the Green Sandpiper were at that time absolutely unknown to any person in 
this country, and to very few on the Continent. On a former occasion I gave some 
account of them (Proc. Zool. Soc. 1863, pp. 529-532), and as they are, so far as | 
know, almost singular among those of the whole group of Limicole*, I may perhaps 
be excused from recurring to the subject—the more so since some of the eggs to 
be presently mentioned were obtained by two of the three men who, each in- 
dependently of the other, made this very remarkable discovery—Herr W. Hintz 
and Mr. Wheelwright. In ‘Naumannia’ for 1851 (Heft ii. p. 50) Herr Passler 
' (I myself doubt whether the species ever reaches lat. 62° N. Herr Wallengren 
(Naumannia, 1855, p. 137) gives lat. 67° as its northern limit, but cites no 
authority for the statement. The district assigned to it, between Bodé and 
Qvikjock (ef. Hewitson, Eggs Br. B. ed. 3, ii. p. 334*), has since been explored 
by Ludwig, as above, the Messrs. Godman (Ibis, 1861, p. 87), and Mr. Wheelwright 
(Spring and Summer in Lapland, p. 850), without meeting with the bird, and, 
from what we now know of its nesting-habits, is wholly unsuited for it. In 
Russian Lapland the birds observed by Mr. Henry Pearson’s party and attributed 
to this species (Ibis, 1896, p. 212) really were Wood-Sandpipers, as he has since 
stated (Beyond Petsora Eastward, pp. 12, 318), though unfortunately the error has 
misled some recent authors. It is very desirable that the northern limit of the 
Green Sandpiper’s breeding-range in Scandinavia should be known.—Eb. |] 
> [There are the exceptional cases of 7. glareola recorded by Mr. Popham (Ibis, 
1897, p. 104); and, as I revise this sheet, news comes that the American 
T. solitarius has the same habit (Ottawa Naturalist, 1904, p. 135).—Ep.]} 
