ORNITHOLOGY OF THE BRITISH POLAR EXPEDITION. 125 
Sedge Warbler. The male, too, will sing while hovering on the 
wing, when notes of the Green Linnet and Hedgesparrow are 
exactly reproduced. At Disco, lat. 69° 15’, I found two nests; 
both were inaccessible, one being high up upon a ledge on a 
precipitous cliff, and the other out of reach in a cranny in a rock. 
The parents fed their young as I stood watching a couple of yards 
off; they showed no alarm whatever. The young, four in number, 
were covered with a very dark down. The parents, if watched, 
will always betray the whereabouts of their nest. At Disco I met 
with Snow Buntings at an altitude of 3200 feet above sea-level ; 
there were a couple of birds, and I observed no other instance of 
animal life at so great a height in high latitudes. Upon the 
29th September, 1876, Snow Buntings had left Egedesminde, 
lat. 68° 40’. They were met with all along the coast to 
Discovery Bay, where they remained till the first week of 
September, 1875; after which they disappeared. In the following 
year I first observed them at Polaris Bay, upon the 15th 
May, when a flock of eight. came down along shore from the 
northward. On the following day more arrived from the same 
direction; they had appeared a few days previously at Discovery 
Bay, upon the opposite coast. By the 20th June they were 
hatching their eggs; four nests I found in our winter quarters 
contained respectively, one, three, and (in two cases) seven eggs 
each. Young birds had flown from the first two, so that seven 
appears to be the usual number of eggs. The nests were snugly 
built of dry grass, lined with owls’ feathers usually, but sometimes 
geese feathers and musk-ox wool were used. The eggs are of a 
greenish grey ground-colour, the size and shape of a Yellow- 
hammer’s, with blots of a reddish chocolate-brown hue, more 
numerous at the larger end, and mostly oval and directed length- 
wise upon the shell; there are few streaks, and none of the bold, 
fanciful markings met with on the eggs of our British Buntings. 
The plumage of the earliest seen Snow Bunting in 1876 was as 
follows :—Breast, head, abdomen, tail-coverts, and secondary 
wing-feathers, white; other wing-feathers, black or flecked with 
black; back-feathers and wing-coverts, brownish black, toned off 
to the end with reddish brown. The chief food of Snow Buntings 
seems to be the flower-heads and seed-tops of Drabas, Papaver 
nudicaule, &c.; earlier in the year they subsist on the budding 
leaf-shoots of Saxifraga oppositifolia. I have also watched them 
