50 BRITISH BIRDS. 



and thinking I had given up the watch as hopeless, he fired off his 

 gun as a last resource, and came up to me. As soon as he fired, both 

 birds rose almost exactly in front of the knoll upon which my tele- 

 scope pointed. Upon his arrival to learn what I had made out, I 

 told him the nest was forty or fifty yards in front of my telescope. 

 We fixed one of our guns pointing in the same direction, so that we could 

 easily see it. W r e then skirted the intervening bog, got our exact bearings 

 from the gun, and commenced a search. In less than a minute we found 

 the nest with four eggs. As before, it was in a depression on a ridge 

 between two little lakes of black bog. In returning to our boat we crossed 

 a higher part of the tundra near the river-bank and saw some Golden 

 Plover. The eggs in this, our fifth nest, were considerably incubated, 

 which was probably the reason why the birds showed more anxiety to 

 lure us away. 



The following day we crossed over again to the tundra, and spent several 

 hours watching some Buffon's and Richardson's Skuas. We watched one 

 of the latter birds to her nest, with two eggs, and then turned our 

 attention to the Grey-Plover ground. We found one of our men trying 

 to watch one of these birds to the nest. We lay down, one fifty yards 

 to his right, and the other as much to his left. The birds behaved exactly 

 as those we watched the day before. After the female had crossed and 

 recrossed one hillock many times, and finally disappeared behind it, I 

 made up my mind that the nest was there, and rose. My sudden 

 appearance alarmed the male, who flew up, showing his black axillaries 

 very distinctly in the evening sunshine as he .skimmed over my head. We 

 then all three rose, and in less than a minute met at the nest, which 

 contained three eggs. I sat down to pack the eggs ; and Harvie-Brown fol- 

 lowed the male, who came up as we found the nest. Whilst I was packing 

 the eggs and warming my hands, and talking pigeon-Russ with the man, 

 the female came within range, and I took up my gun and shot her. 



Our seventh and eighth nests of the Grey Plover we took on the 9th 

 of July. We set sail at noon, with a north-east wind, to visit the tundra 

 eight or ten versts higher up the great river. For some distance before 

 we landed the coast was very flat, with willows down to the water's edge. 

 Amongst these dwarf trees we repeatedly heard the Petchora Pipit (Anthus 

 gustavi] and the Siberian Chiffchaff (Phylloscopus tristis). As soon as we 

 got beyond the willows we landed on the tundra, and started in pursuit 

 of a large flock of Buffon's Skuas, but were soon stopped by a pair of 

 Grey Plovers, which showed by their actions that we were near the nest. 

 We lay down as before, forty or fifty yards apart, and watched the birds. 

 They ran about, up and down and all round us ; and at the end of half an 

 hour we were no wiser than at first. There was evidently something 

 wrong. Harvie-Brown then shouted to me, " Have you marked the nest ?" 



