THE WILLOW-GROUSE 147 



mound. The nest contained three eggs, and the behaviour 

 of the birds as we neared it was the same as had been 

 that of the falcons of the day before. My companion 

 succeeded in shooting the male. We found many nests 

 of other birds. Our Samoyede in the morning brought 

 us one of the black-throated diver, containing two eggs, 

 and in the course of the day we found a second. We 

 also secured nests of the golden plover, long-tailed duck, 

 wheatear, Temrninck's stint, blue-throat, and Lapland 

 bunting ; in the latter were young birds. Our most 

 interesting find, however, was the nest with two eggs of 

 Richardson's skua, placed on a tussock of mossy ground. 

 It was lined with some reindeer moss and leaves of the 

 surrounding plants. The devices of the birds to deceive 

 us, as we came near it, attracted our attention and revealed 

 its vicinity. They often alighted within fifteen yards of 

 us, shammed lameness and sickness, reeled from side to 

 side as if mortally wounded, then when we persisted in 

 our onward course they flew boldly at us and stopped 

 repeatedly. 



We again saw the dotterels, but apparently not yet 

 nesting. Willow-grouse were as plentiful on this part of 

 the tundra as red grouse on the Bradfield moors on 

 the 1 2th. Their white wings and their almost entirely 

 white bodies made them very conspicuous objects. They 

 usually rose within shot from a patch of willow cover. 

 Sometimes we saw a pair knocking about the tundra like 

 two big white butterflies, with a peculiar up-and-down 

 flight, then they tumbled into a willow-grown knoll 

 on the hillside. It might be owing to their extreme 

 conspicuousness that their flight always seemed so much 

 more clumsy than that of the red grouse. One of their 

 nests, which we found on the ground, contained a baker's 

 dozen of eggs. It was a mere hollow scraped in the turf, 



