590 Mr. A. Trevor- Battye on the 



and is generally distributed. I even saw one pair on Walden 

 Island, near the Seven Islands, in about N. lat. 80° 40'. It 

 nests on almost every conceivable kind of ground, from the 

 turf-ridges round low and swampy hollows to high up on 

 the mountain sides. Those I obtained off the eggs them- 

 selves were, with one exception, male birds ; and there can 

 be no doubt that the greater part of the hatching is done by 

 the male. This is probably true of the Sandpipers generally. 

 The Purple Sandpiper, though (for a Sandpiper) clumsy in 

 shape, has many of the pretty habits of its allied species — the 

 habit, for instance, when at rest, of raising one wing at a 

 time and holding it fully extended straight up in the air. 

 Like all Sandpipers, they do much of their courtship on the 

 wing, chasing one another in circles with rapid turns and 

 shifts. On the ground I have seen the male bird approach 

 the female with trailing wings, arched back, and head low 

 down, occasionally hopping, like a courting pigeon. It is 

 usual for writers to speak of the nest of this wader, and of 

 that of the Waders generally, as a '^ shallow depression.'^ As 

 a matter of fact the nest of the Purple Sandpiper (of the Little 

 Stint, Dunlin, and some others) would be better described as 

 a " deep cup." The nest now shown in the National 

 Collection, which I removed with its surroundings from 

 Advent Bay, was a deep cup containing many dead leaves of 

 Salix polaris *. Mr. Arnold Pike has a note for Oct. 5th : 

 "Purple Sandpiper still here'' (Danes Island). 



16. Calidris arenabia (Linr.). Sanderling. 



It has been reserved for my friend Mr. Arnold Pike to have 



* The statement is made (in Yarrell, 4tli ed. iii. p. 411) that in Spits- 

 bergen the nest of this bird is lined with the leaves of Betnla nana. 

 Those noticed were almost certainly the leaves of Salix polaris. The 

 creeping birch is so exceedingly rare in Spitsbergen that I failed to find 

 an example; and Baron de Qeer, on whose report for 1895 the single 

 record of this plant was made, was himself unable to find the plant when 

 there last year. 



[Saunders took the above from Messrs. Evans and Sturge, who say 

 (p. 171): — "Beautiful little nests they were, deep in the ground, and 

 lined with stalks of grass and leaves of the Dwarf Birch {Befvla nana, 

 L.)."— Edd.] 



