41 



ground. A smaller flock passed by directly afterwards, out of which I secured two. To my 

 intense delight these five birds were all Little Stints, at last. ' On dissection they all proved to 

 be males. 



" I shortly afterwards got a shot at a small flock of Sandpipers feeding on the mud left by 

 the tide, and killed one of them, which proved to be a Curlew Sandpiper, female. I searched 

 diligently for nests, but in vain; and when I reached the beacon one of the boats had been 

 waiting for me half an hour. 



" It was not until the 22nd July that we were able to visit Dvoinik again. On that day 

 the steamer was placed at our disposal, thanks to Captain Arendt; and in the afternoon we 

 dismissed the steamer for a week, and took possession of a wrecked ship lying high and dry on 

 the beach not far from Dvoinik. 



"As soon as we had landed our stores, we started off in the evening in high glee for a raid 

 upon the Little Stints. We hastened down to the shores of the lake, where I had seen the 

 birds before, and carefully searched the sand hills and the other lakes, but found no trace what- 

 ever of any breeding-stations, only a flock of small Sandpipers occasionally to be seen, but so wild 

 that we could not get within range. We then separated for a stroll on the tundra. I had not 

 gone far before I heard our interpreter Piottuch shouting in a state of great excitement. Harvie- 

 Brown was the first to come up ; and I joined them shortly afterwards. I found them sitting on 

 the ground with a couple of Little Stints in down. I sat down beside them, and we watched 

 the parent bird as she was fluttering and flying and runnning all round us, sometimes coming 

 within a foot of one of us. After securing the old bird we went on a short distance, and 

 Piottuch again made loud demonstrations of delight. This time it was nest and eggs. The 

 nest was like that of most Sandpipers, a mere depression in the ground, with such dead maroshka 

 (cloudberry) leaves and other dry material as was within easy reach, scraped together to serve as 

 lining. The position was on a comparatively dry extent of tundra, sloping from the top of the 

 little turf cliffs that rise from the lagoon down to the sand hills at the twin capes, between which 

 the tide runs in and out of a little inland sea. These sand hills are flanked on the side next the 

 sea with piles of drift wood of all sizes and shapes — lofty trees which have been mown down by 

 the ice when the great river broke up and in many places overflowed its banks, squared balks of 

 timber washed away by the floods from the stores of the Petchora timber-trading company, and 

 spars of luckless ships that have been wrecked on these inhospitable shores. They are sparingly 

 sprinkled over with esparto grass, and soon run into an irregular strip of sand and gravel. This 

 part of the coast, however, does not seem to have any attraction for the Little Stints. There 

 were plenty of Ring-Dotterel upon it, and a few Temminck's Stints ; and we saw a pair of Snow- 

 Buntings with five young, which had probably been bred amongst the drift wood. At Dvoinik, 

 however, for perhaps a verst from each twin cape, between the sand and the mouth of the little 

 inland sea, is an extent of dead flat land, covered over with thick short grass, and full of little 

 lakes, mostly very shallow and filled with black or coffee-coloured mud with an inch or two of 

 brackish water upon it. Some of these pools are covered with aquatic plants ; and others are 

 open water. These lakes and pools seem to be the real point of attraction ; and on their edges 

 the Little Stints feed, in small flocks of from half a dozen birds to a score, as they happen to 

 meet from the tundra. The large flock of perhaps a hundred or more birds, which was occa- 



