GLAUCOUS-GULL 175 



are placed among the shingle and drift on the beach above high-water 

 mark, or so low down on the cliffs that they can easily be reached, 

 while others are placed on low rocks and islets, and one nest was 

 found by Eaton among the upturned roots of a dead spruce fir. 1 In 

 the great loomeries of Novaya Zemlya Pearson found the glaucous- 

 gulls occupying the topmost ledges of the great ranges of cliff, from 

 whence they could look down on the myriads of breeding guillemots 

 below them. 2 On the other hand, on Korga Island, off the Murman 

 coast, he found a large colony breeding on the sand-dunes, which 

 reached to a height of some thirty or forty feet, 3 and Seebohm also 

 found young birds on the sandy, low-lying Golaievski Islands, near 

 the mouth of the Petchora River. Where there is plenty of material 

 available, the glaucous-gull builds a big substantial nest of some two 

 feet in diameter and 3^ to 5- inches high, composed of tang and 

 other seaweed, moss, and dead grass pulled up by the roots. 

 Kolthoff noticed blossoms of Saxifraga oppositiflora in the nest, and 

 Le Roi found Cochlearia officinalis similarly used on Bear Island. On 

 sandy islets where there is little in the way of material, the nests are 

 mere hollowed heaps of sand lined with a few tufts of seaweed, while 

 on Prince Charles Foreland Kolthoff found nests composed entirely 

 of stones about the size of a pigeon's egg. 



In most cases fresh or slightly incubated eggs may be taken in 

 the first or second week of June, but Romer and Schaudinn found 

 many young in down in Spitzbergen on June 13, so that in some cases 

 the eggs must be laid by mid-May. Off the Murman coast Pearson 

 found the eggs fresh or only slightly incubated on June 27. The 

 eggs are from two to three in number as a rule, and Pearson found 

 that all three young were frequently hatched out, and that the third 

 egg was not necessarily unfertile, as is often the case in Spitzbergen. 

 Four eggs have occasionally been found in one nest, and in Spitz- 

 bergen this seems to have occurred more than once, for both Romer 



1 Zoologist, 1874, 3811. 



2 H. J. Pearson, Beyond Petsora Eastward, p. 163. 



3 Three Summers in Russian Lapland, p. 105. 



