AN ORNITHOLOGICAL TOUR IN NORWAY. 457 



tame birds on a grassy spot on the shores of Tromso. They 

 were in poor summer dress ; middle of belly black, with a white 

 feather or two, throat and face brownish. Perhaps birds of the 

 previous year. 



Htematopus ostralegus. — Not uncommon around the shores of 

 Tromso, where their shrill piping, and sharp cry of " my feet " 

 when on the wing, might often be heard. I found, on the 14th, 

 on a narrow beach below the straggling birch woods, a nest with 

 two eggs on the point of hatching. The nest was on a narrow 

 belt of fine shingle (sometimes covered by a very high tide, for 

 bladder-wrack lay further inland) about fifteen yards from low, 

 and ten from the ordinary high, water mark. The nest was 

 neatly lined with small stones, and bits of cockle, scallop, and 

 mussel shells ; the lining did not match the eggs in colour, for 

 the shingle there was slate-grey and white. There is a rocky 

 point at the north end of Grindo, with some beach of broken 

 shells (cockle, whelk, bright red Pecten, &c.) and a little turf, 

 where a good many birds breed. Here we found two nests placed 

 where the rock and turf were mixed up. They contained only 

 one egg each (one was fairly fresh), and had probably been 

 robbed. One nest was lined with small stones, bits of hard dead 

 wood, and a fragment or two of shell ; the other was lined chiefly 

 with broken shells. 



Strepsilas inter pres. — A pair on this rocky point were, from 

 their movements and tameness, probably nesting. A sharp 

 single note was uttered by the bird on rising. 



Phalaropus hyperboreus. — On the high ground at the back of 

 Tromso town there is a small lake or tarn, surrounded except at 

 one end, where some boggy ground merges into it, with birch 

 woods. Two grassy islands, besides minute islets, break its 

 surface at the marshy end. On the 18th we found two pairs of 

 Red-necked Phalaropes here ; we had not noticed them before, 

 and upon our first visit to the lake on the 13th it was chiefly 

 frozen and snowed up. The little birds were wonderfully tame, 

 floating high like ducks, or swimming rapidly, snapping eagerly 

 from side to side at the insects on the water, along the shores of 

 the islets. They often visited a patch of floating wood and weeds 

 close to us, on which they occasionally landed. But what in- 

 terested me most was the very evident play or display made by 

 the females (or at least by the finer, brighter birds of the pairs, 



ZOOLOGIST, THIRD SERIES, VOL. XX. DEC, 1896. 2 N 



