122 THE VOYAGE OF THE VEGA. [chaA 
in succession that it sometimes has to stand without moving, 
unable to fly further until it has thrown up what it had 
swallowed. The skua in this way commonly takes part in 
the plundering of every eider island. The walrus-hunters are 
very much embittered against the bird on account of this in¬ 
trusion on their industry, and kill it whenever they can. The 
whalers called it “ struntjaeger’’-refuse-hunter—because they 
believed that it hunted gulls in order to make them void their 
excrements which “ struntjaegeren ” was said to devour as a 
luxury. 
The skua breeds upon low, unsheltered, often water-drenched 
headlands and islands, where it lays one or two eggs on the 
bare ground, often without trace of a nest. The eggs are so 
like the ground that it is only with difficulty that they can be 
found. The male remains in the neighbourhood of the nest 
during the hatching season. If a man, or an animal which 
the bird considers dangerous, approaches the eggs, the pair 
endeavour to draw attention from them by removing from the 
nest, creeping on the ground and flapping their wings in the 
most pitiful wny. The bird thus acts with great skill a 
veritable comedy, but takes good care that it is not caught. 
As is well known, we know only two varieties of colour in 
this bird, a self-coloured brown, and a brown on the upper part 
of the body with white below. Of these I have only once in 
the Arctic regions seen the self-coloured variety, viz. at Bell 
Sound in 1858. All the hundreds of skuas which I have 
seen, besides, have had the throat and lower part of the body 
coloured white. 
This bird is very common on Spitzbergen and Novaya 
Zemlya. Yet perhaps it scarcely breeds on the north part of 
North-East Land. Along with the bird now described there 
occur, though sparingly, two others :—hredstjertade Iciblen, the 
Pomarine skua {Lestris pomarina, Tern.) miA fjelladben, Buffon’s 
skua (Lestris Biiffonii, Boie). The latter is distinguished by its 
