i6o8 THE PERCHING BIRDS 



redeemed from ugliness by large strips of cotton grass. A partial resident in most of 

 its haunts, many individuals, merely shifting from the higher grounds to the plains 

 before the arrival of winter, the meadow pipit loves rough marshy ground and tree- 

 less wastes of heather, rearing its young in the most remote and forbidding solitudes. 

 Although its song is inferior in compass to that of the tree pipit, it is chanted on 

 the wing. The meadow pipit nests on rough ground and undrained meadows, build- 

 ing a slight nest of dried stems of grass, often in a tussock of herbage, sometimes a 

 very little above the tide mark on the seabeach. The eggs are white in ground 

 color, closely mottled with brown or brownish gray. The cuckoo is exceedingly 

 fond of depositing her eggs in the meadow pipit's nest, and it is diverting to watch 

 a pair of these birds endeavoring to oust one of these undesirable neighbors from 

 their vicinity. It is often assumed that the cuckoo finds a willing dupe in the 

 meadow pipit, but such is not the case in actual fact. When the cuckoos first arrive 

 in England, and commence to pair and lay, the meadow pipits assail the strangers 

 with persistency, not only mobbing them with angry cries, but also using physical 

 means to enforce their opinions; the small birds not hesitating to alight upon the 

 back of the cuckoo. As soon, however, as the young cuckoo has become the sole 

 object of the charge of the pipits, the latter accept the situation with admirable for- 

 titude, working early and late to satisfy the hungry maw of their foster child. The 

 meadow pipit is very subject to a variation of plumage, especially when young; one 

 of the prettiest varieties being of a buff canary yellow throughout, and we have seen 

 others pied with white. A small pale race is found in Madeira. The meadow pipit 

 is olive brown above, with dark centres to the feathers, often tinged with olive 

 green; the under parts being buffish white, thickly streaked with dark brown. 



A large species of pipit, known as Richard's pipit (A. richardi), 

 " breeds in North Siberia, whence stragglers often wander to Britain 

 during the autumn and winter. Mr. Seebohm states that he found this pipit 

 "exceedingly abundant in the meadows on the banks of the Yenisei near Yeniseik. 

 The country is almost a dead flat for miles, and is intersected with half dried-up 

 river beds, and chains of swampy lakes full of tall sedges and reeds and water 

 plants of various kinds, and half concealed by willow bushes and alders, while far 

 away in the distance the horizon is bounded on every side by the forest. These 

 oases of grass in the boundless forest are the paradise of Richard's pipit. As I 

 wandered away from the town this bird became more common. I found it difficult 

 to shoot them on the ground, as they ran about on the grass, but I soon obtained 

 as many examples as I wanted, as they hovered in the air almost like the kestrel. 

 . . . Dybowski found them equally common on the plateaus near Lake Baikal, 

 at an elevation of five thousand feet above the level of the sea. They arrive about 

 the middle of May, and build their nests upon the ground in the grass. They usu- 

 ally choose a hollow in the meadows, such as the footprint, in the soft earth, of a 

 cow or a horse. The first nest is made in the first half of June, and frequently a 

 second brood is reared, the eggs being laid in the second half .of July. The nests 

 are said to be very difficult to find. The male keeps watch, and, on the approach 

 of danger, he gives the alarm to the female, who leaves the nest and runs along 

 the ground for some distance, when she rises and joins the male in endeavoring to 



