THE LITTLE AND TEMMINCK'S STINTS 185 



Our young grey plovers in down, when we visited 

 them, we found thriving. There were five small birds in 

 excellent condition. 



The five sanderlings that we had shot on the islands 

 were three males and two females. The testes of the 

 former were small, the latter had eggs about the size of a 

 pin's head. Both males and females showed signs of 

 moult ; they had some bare places almost like sitting- 

 spots, but no recent ones. 



The curlew sandpiper turned out to be a female, with 

 very small eggs, and showed no signs of having been 

 breeding this year. 



The five Little stints in our possession proved to be 

 all males. Temminck's stints were very common at 

 Alexievka. They were breeding abundantly : sometimes 

 we found them in single pairs, sometimes almost in 

 colonies, but we had never met with flocks of these birds 

 since leaving the neighbourhood of Habariki. Those 

 that we had come upon afterwards had never failed to 

 show us by their ways that we were intruding upon their 

 breeding quarters. When Harvie- Brown visited Arch- 

 angel in 1872 he found Temminck's stints breeding on 

 one of the islands of the delta of the Dvina. This was 

 probably not far from the southern limit of their breeding 

 range. He also continually observed this species in 

 other localities, congregating in small flocks together, and 

 evidently not breeding. These might have been the 

 birds of the preceding year. If, as it is pretty well 

 established, few sandpipers breed until the second year, 

 and the young birds flock, during their first summer, 

 somewhere near the southern limit of the breeding- 

 stations, it might also be augured that the Little stints I 

 had seen were probably breeding at no great distance 

 from the spot I had visited the previous day. The 



