TEMMINCK'S STINT. m 



but a few are indistinctly rufous ; shafts of the outer primary only white, of the 

 rest nearly as dusky as the rest of the feathers ; throat and chin white ; sides of 

 the head (excepting a dusky white eyebrow), neck and upper breast, grey, streaked 

 and spotted finely with dusky brown: rest of under parts white; tail brownish, 

 outer pair of feathers white, the rest passing by degrees into the brown of the 

 central ones ; legs and feet greenish-grey. Length 5 J to 6 inches, closed wing 



3* to 4- 



Adults in winter have lost, by the autumn moult, the black markings on the 

 back, and the upper parts are plain uniform grey, with a brownish tinge and 

 slightly darker centres to the feathers. 



Young birds are like the adults in winter, with sandy margins to the feathers 

 of the upper parts, and the upper breast is tinged with tawny and but little 

 spotted. 



The nestling is yellow above, mottled and spotted with black, and with 

 silvery white tips ; white underneath, with a yellowish brown shade on the chest. 



N.B. Temminck's Stint can be distinguished from the Little Stint by the 



colour of the legs when fresh, which are greenish-grey instead of black by the 



first primary only having a white shaft by the white, not grey, outer tail feathers 



by the slightly smaller size and by the absence of chestnut on the upper parts. 



While the Little Stint seems to nest, as a rule, near the sea-shore, so that it 

 can feed on tidal mud, Temminck's Stint haunts and breeds near fresh water, and 

 often far from the sea. This is a general, but not an invariable rule. On the 

 Goubesta River, in Kolguiev, in 1895, we found the "spheres of influence" of the 

 two birds sharply defined. The Little Stint bred, in some numbers, as far up the 

 river as the tide went, but no further ; above that limit we found Temminck's 

 nesting, but not below it. When at Lake Yokan (Sviatoi Nos, Russian Laplaud) 

 earlier the same year, which is about eight miles inland from the head of the 

 fjord, we found a considerable colony of Temminck's Stint, breeding on small 

 grassy islets. The first nest found contained eggs very like the Little Stint's, 

 which we quite hoped they were until I shot the old bird. We had shot Little 

 Stints on the fjord; but if we had been aware of the rule above mentioned as 

 I, at all events, ought to have been we should have been saved from a keen 

 disappointment, because we should not have looked for Little Stints breeding so 

 far inland. The nest of Temminck's Stint is a hollow amongst grass, usually well 

 concealed, and lined with a few bits of dry grass. Four eggs are laid, about mid- 

 summer, very pyriform, varying in colour from pale stone-colour to greenish-buff, 

 mottled and blotched with burnt sienna or sepia. Seebohm says (" Siberia in 

 Europe," p. 275) that "the eggs of the Little Stint can hardly be mistaken for 



