PREFACE 



Anyone who writes about the birds of Yenesei, now- 

 adays, does so with diffidence, for the recollection of 

 the Birds of Siberia is always present with him, like a 

 critic standing at his shoulder. But the journey down 

 the river is shorter than it was in Seebohm's time, and 

 therefore there is less opportunity to observe the birds 

 and men who live along the banks ; for taiga and 

 tundra slide past as quickly as at a kinematograph 

 show. There is more scope at Golchika, and there, if 

 wishes might have found place, I should like to have 

 woven a little of the spell of the tundra into these 

 lines of print — the voices of the wild-fowl calling up 

 the summer, the poppies above the snowdrifts, the 

 smell of driftwood fires, and the squelch of the rein- 

 deer's little hoofs in the moss. But this book has no 

 pretension to such art. It contains merely some pages 

 from the jom-nal of a season spent among birds, which, 

 for the most part, are known in this country only on 

 migration or as vagrants. 



The scientific names employed are those used in 

 the Hand-List of British Birds (1912), except for 

 certain species not included in the British lists, for 

 which the nomenclature is that of H. E. Dresser's 

 Manual of Palsearctic Birds. 



