i66 BIRDS OF RUSSIAN LAPLAND 



are either mucli disturbed, or sometimes breed late in tbe season, 

 for another pair were busy building. We heard two Eversmann's 

 Warblers singing to-day, and thought we had secured a nest with 

 iive eggs, but it turned out to be a Willow-Wren's. A small colony 

 of Sand-Martins were nesting in a sandbank near the Kola river ; we 

 dug out several nests with eggs, all twelve to fifteen inches in the bank, 

 the eggs much incubated. Their relatives, the House-Martins, had a 

 number of nests on one of the houses in Kola, where the window-heads 

 formed a specially good foundation. As far as we noticed they were 

 confined to that house only. 



July ^th gave little of interest to record. We took another nest 

 of Temminck's Stints' eggs near the Tuloma ; and caught four young, 

 which moved nearly lOO yards in less than two hours, though they 

 were only some two days old. A pair of Buffon's Skua had two eggs 

 half-incubated on high ground ; they were the only birds of this 

 species seen in the country this season; both mobbed poor Juno 

 severely when she approached the nest. We spent some hours in a 

 last effort to find nests of the Pine-Grosbeak but only saw one bird 

 (with red breast) and some old nests. I shot two Mealy Redpolls, the 

 rumps of both of which were white and unstriated. Several of these 

 birds secured in May were similar. It is therefore curious that all 

 the birds shot in this district by Mr. Witherby should have been 

 typical specimens of Linota linaria. Mosquitoes that night made us 

 long to be out of the country, they hummed round our veils like a 

 hive of bees and generally made life a burden. 



July 6th was chiefly occupied in packing, as we were to leave 

 that afternoon by the Russian mail steamer. When everything was 

 finished and the boxes taken down to the boat a telegram came saying 

 the steamer would not arrive till about midnight. Our friend Mr. 

 Skjcerseth once more rescued us from our troubles — all the food 

 being packed — by taking us to his house for dinner. There we met 

 our two countrymen, who were returning by the same steamer, and a 

 very pleasant meal was that last one on Russian soil. It was nearly 



