HABITS AND MIGRATION OF THE SNOW BUNTING. 3 
so rarely be discovered. Mr. Wheelwright (‘A Spring and 
Summer in Lapland),’ says he always found it higher up the 
fells than the Shore Lark, but never succeeded in discovering the 
nest. The wildest and most desolate spots on these Arctic fells 
were the haunt of the little Snow-flake; miles of broken ground, 
covered with nothing but loose shingly slate and ironstone, and 
scattered boulders of erratic rock. No wonder, then, that the 
nest is so difficult to discover. 
The nest has also occasionally been found amidst the great 
masses of drift-wood, river-borne, cast by currents on the Polar 
shores, containing perchance relics of stout-ribbed ships lost in 
the whale fishery, or of such as have failed, striving nobly to the 
end, to find the great white gate leading to the Pole. Strangest 
of all places for nesting, Captain Lyons relates how, on the barren 
coast of an Arctic island, he found the nest of a Snow Bunting in 
a shallow grave within the bleached skeleton of an Eskimo child. 
It appears that the breeding quarters of this species extend 
from near the Pole as far south as latitude 56° 40’ North in 
the British Isles, and are restricted less by the latitude than 
elevation above sea-level. Like the Ptarmigan, the feathers of 
which are so frequently found in its nest, it lingers still on the 
summits of the highest mountains in North Britain, amongst the 
dwarf-willow and snow-saxifrage, and many a bonny Arctic plant, 
last relics of that old fauna and flora which in the glacial period 
extended, with the Lapp, Reindeer, and Snowy Owl, even to the 
blue waters of the Mediterranean. 
Notwithstanding the high latitudes in which the Snow Bunting 
nests, it is by no means a late breeder. Capt. Feilden found it 
nesting plentifully in the neighbourhood of Godhavn in the second 
week in July, in one case with the young nearly ready to fly. In 
_ Novaja Zemlia, Th. Von Heuglin states (‘ Tbis,’ 1872, p. 61), it 
is everywhere abundant; he found newly-fledged young at the 
beginning of August, at which time there were still birds unable 
to fly; he says that the autumnal moult of the old ones occurs at 
the end of August, and the southern migration commences about 
the middle of September. Capt. Feilden remarks that, on the 
return of the last Polar Expedition under Capt. Nares, when near 
lat. 73° 40’ N., on September 18th, flocks of Snow Buntings were 
seen migrating to the south. In 1874 Mr. Seebohm found them 
breeding on the island of Vadso in the Varanger Fjord, but was 
