A SUMMER ON THE YENESEI 145 



nearest breeding-place, I shot a young bird there in 

 the spotted ochre plumage of the first autumn. He 

 still wore a little coronal of down among his new 

 frontal feathers. The golden plover do not leave 

 Golchika until the end of August, at which time I saw 

 flocks of twenty or thirty birds flying up the Yenesei. 



The bar-tailed godwit was the last of the six rare 

 waders of Golchika, and it was the only one, alas ! whose 

 nest I did not find. It was very scarce in the district. 

 I saw only two pairs altogether. The Samoyedes 

 called this bird " Tufek." They said that she arrived 

 very early in the spring, and ran round the frozen 

 pools, tapping the ice with her long bill and crying 

 impatiently for the thaw. Like most of the bird-lore 

 of country people all the world over, this fancy 

 probably has a germ of truth in it. The godwits breed 

 on the highest parts of the tundra, which are the first 

 places to be freed from snow ; and I should think that 

 they lay their eggs very early, for birds that I saw on 

 12th July evidently had young ones close at hand. 

 The alarm note has been syllabled as lou-ey-lou-ey- 

 lou-ey. To me it sounds exactly like the clapper- 

 clapper made by sharpening a scythe on a whetstone. 



There were three distinct types of country round 

 Golchika, and in a short time one learned to know 

 just what birds to expect in each. First there were 

 the river banks and the neighbouring swamps. Stints, 

 phalaropes, reeves, and dunlin were the representative 

 species in such places. Then there were the dry, stony 

 hills that divided the tundra from the marsh. Here 

 you might expect to find the shore-lark — a quarrelsome 



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