2904 GALLINAGO GALLINULA. 
plenty of men and boys in good working order. There have 
certainly been but few Jack Snipes in the country this season. The 
nest of the 17th and the four of the 18th of June were all alike 
in structure, made loosely of little pieces of grass and Equisetum not 
at all woven together, with a few old leaves of the dwarf birch, 
placed in a dry sedgy or grassy spot close to more open swamp. 
I found them generally at the best time for walking birds up from 
their nests, that is in rainy weather or about midnight. The gnats, 
llowever, are there so terrible—voracious—destructive—no word is 
too strong—that tar oil, Templar caps, veils, and thick leather gloves 
are indispensable. 
It was not long after I first heard it that I ascertained that the 
remarkable hammering noise in the air was made by the Jack 
Snipe; but I have not yet quite satisfied myself whether the keet 
koot, keet koot on the ground, and the daa-aa-aa in the air, which 
are constantly to be heard in the same places, are made by one 
and the same bird at different times. At a considerable height it is 
not easy to distinguish a Jack Snipe from another Snipe, and the 
clicking and bleating seem to my ears exactly like the Common 
Snipe’s. However I did not find a single nest of the latter bird in 
Tso- or Kharto-uoma, though I have met with one or two elsewhere 
in the neighbourhood. Few of the country people recognize two 
kinds; they consider that all the sounds proceed from the same 
bird, the “ Ram of the Heavens ”’: they take them for signs of the 
weather, or they adapt them to words pretending to be the lamenta- 
tions of transmigrated girls, who have died in their maidenhood and 
are bewailing their hard fate ; but the lads generally get the worst 
of it in a trial of wit with their fair companions. 
[The above, written by Mr. Wolley from Muoniovara, 27 November, 1854, 
to Mr. Hewitson, was by him printed, with a few omissions (now restored), in 
the Third Edition of his work. It must not be claimed for Mr. Wolley that 
he was the first discoverer of the eggs of this species, though certainly the first 
to describe its mode of nidification. The former distinction seems due to 
Mr. Hoy, who is stated to have brought specimens of its eggs from Valkens- 
waard in North Brabant, one of which, from Mr. Yarrell’s collection, 
Mr. Hewitson figured in 1842 (Brit. Ool. Suppl. pl. clxviii.), and a second, 
from Mr. Tuke’s collection, in 1845 in his Second Edition (pl. Ixxxvi. fig. 3). 
About the genuineness of the former some doubt may perhaps be entertained, 
but the latter appears to be true. Through Mr. Hoy’s premature death 
particulars of them were never published, and it is to be said that the Jack 
Snipe has been over and over again unsuccessfully sought as a breeding bird 
in the district in which he was reported to have obtained its nest, and that I 
