6° British Birds, with their Nests and Eggs. 



as to what that mysterious country, in which it spent the summer and brought 

 forth its brood, might prove to be. That it nested in very high latitudes appeared 

 certain, and on this fact it was firmly held by many that there must be islands or 

 considerable masses of land in the neighbourhood of the North Pole — a theory 

 dispelled by Nan sen's investigations. 



The Wedge-tailed Gull is often known also as Ross' Rosy Gull, after Sir J. 

 C. Ross, the intrepid navigator, who discovered it, in 1823, on Melville Peninsula 

 (between 6o° and 70 N. latitude), during his Arctic Expedition. The bird had, 

 however, been brought to Europe from Greenland by Gieseake, and acquired, in 

 18 18, by the Imperial Museum in Vienna, where it remained during that interval 

 undetected and uudescribed. 



The distribution of this rare Gull is still imperfectly known. It has, however, 

 been recorded from Melville Peninsula, in latitude 69 30' N., and from Boothia, 

 across by Greenland, to the Fseroe Islands.* It has been reported, by Parry, in 

 8 2° N. latitude on the meridian of Spitzbergen; and it had been shot, according to 

 Lieutenant Payer, near Franz-Josef Land. The zoologist of the Jeannette expedition 

 shot eight specimens, near the 27th parallel, three of which he brought back with 

 him, despite the hardships of the terrible journey, which he and his companions 

 made across the ice, after the loss of their vessel in 1881. Beyond the bird's 

 occurrence in these few localities, nothing was known of the region of its nativity 

 till the return of Dr. Fridtjof Nansen, from his celebrated expedition across the arctic 

 circumpolar seas, and its life history remains still known only to the bird itself. 



When the From, as Nansen records in his " Farthest North," was in 

 about 8i c 40' N. latitude, and 120 E. longitude: — "On August 3rd [1894] 

 a remarkable occurrence took place ; we were visited by the Arctic Rose 

 Gull fRhodostethia rosea). I wrote as follows about it in my diary : — 

 ' To-day my longing has at last been satisfied. I have shot Ross' Gull — three 

 specimens in one day. This rare and mysterious inhabitant of the unknown north, 

 which is only occasionally seen, and of which no one knows whence it cometh or 

 whither it goeth, which belongs exclusively to the world to which the imagination 

 aspires, is what, from the first moment I saw these tracts, I had always hoped to 

 discover, as my eyes roamed over the lonely plains of ice. And now it came when 

 I was least thinking of it. I was out for a little walk on the ice by the ship, 

 and as I was sitting down by a hummock my eyes wandered northwards and lit 

 on a bird hovering over the great pressure-mound away to the north-west. At 

 first I took it to be a Kittiwake, but soon discovered it rather resembled the 



* Dr. L. Stejnegar recently received a fully adult example of the Wedge-Tailed Gull, from Bering Island, 

 ■where it was obtained on December loth, 1895.— H.A.M. 



