SL Qui 11/ ill : Some Avicultural Notes. 205 



ment is slow, for my nestling's eyes were only partly opened on 

 the eleventh day. 



The gape was of a brilliant crimson-violet, which vanished 

 speedily after death, and had almost disappeared when the 

 bird had reached the Natural History Museum (in spirit). 

 It was curious to note that though the primaries were only just 

 beginning to shoot, the scarlet wax tips of the secondaries could 

 be distinctly seen through their transparent sheaths. 



Snowy Owls. I have a splendid pair of these birds, 

 brought from Norway by a friend in July igoi. That was a 

 Lemming year, when the hordes of the little rodents were 

 over-running the district, attended as usual, by numbers of 

 beasts and birds of pre}-, the beasts including wolves, and the 

 birds including goshawks, rough-legged and common buzzards, 

 and snowy owls.* 



A Lapp had brought the young birds many miles, in a rough 

 basket, and they were in a sorry plight. He had a bag hanging 

 •on his back, and as he turned away, my friend saw it move, 

 and asked what was inside. It was the poor male bird, which 

 had been daring enough to dash at the Lapp's chest when he 

 was taking the young, and got its claws entangled in the latter's 

 clothing, and was grabbed before he could clear himself. There 

 was also the body of the female owl, which had been bored 

 through with a spherical bullet, from an elk rifle, fired at very 

 close quarters, as she sat snapping her beak while her nest was 

 being robbed. They were being taken further down the valley, 

 to an official, so that the head-money offered for beasts and 

 birds of prey might be claimed. My friend secured both 

 for a price slightly above the official reward, and cleverly 

 brought the old bird, who was half-stifled, but not otherwise 

 seriously hurt, back to complete health, and he came over to 

 England with the nestlings. 



My birds have gone to nest many times. They are late 

 breeders, and if July is a warm month, the young are seldom 



* Two years later I was fishing in the same valle}^ A few wolves 

 remained. They had practically destroyed the small flock of a farmer 

 near where I stayed, a few days before I got there. But the Snowy Owls 

 had retired to the higher mountains, and there was no more than the usual 

 number of the other Raptores breeding in the neighbourhood that season. 

 But I was shewn places where quantities of Lemming skeletons and skins 

 remained, notably a cutting on the Stockholm and Trondhjem Railway, 

 where the little animals tumbled over a rock some forty feet high on to the 

 line, and had smothered each other in a water gully. 



1910 May I. 



