Pseudoscolopax taczanowskii in Western Siberia. 419 
Macrorhamphus semipalmatus from a specimen obtained near 
Calcutta in the winter, it was again described and figured by 
Yerreaux in 1860 (Rev. et Mag. de Zool. p. 206, pi. 14) as 
Macrorhamphus taczanowskii from a specimen obtained in 
Dauria. 
The two specimens now figured, a male and a female in 
full breeding-plumage, were obtained on the 12/25 May, 
1908, not far from Tara, in the valley of the Irtysh, Tobolsk 
Government, Western Siberia. Tara is situated on the left 
bank of the Irtysh River, about two hundred miles below 
Omsk. The valley at that point is only about four kilo¬ 
metres broad, in some places widening to six or seven 
kilometres. The right bank is the higher, and is covered 
with pine and fir wood, forming there the southern portion 
of the Siberian “ taiga.” The left bank is broadly bordered 
by small non-evergreen woods, interspersed by steppe (the so- 
called steppe-forest belt of Russian geographers), but gives 
place further south to the true treeless steppe. Between 
these banks and the bed of the river is a wet meadow inter¬ 
sected by marshy rivulets and streams and covered with small 
lakes and ditches overgrown with reeds, swamps either treeless 
or with small unhealthy pine-trees, and even mossy bogs 
near the right bank. This meadow is uneven, with hollows, 
while parallel with the river are higher beds covered here 
and there with low bushes of Salix, and on the left side of 
the river is a narrow belt of high old Salices. The meadow, 
especially on the left side of the river, is overflowed when 
the water rises in the spring. 
About a mile from Tara a small river called the Arkharka, 
only about five miles long, flows into the Irtysh, and at its 
mouth the meadow is very low, slimy, and treeless. In 
1908 the ice on the Irtysh broke up between the 6th and 
10th of May, new style, and on the 25th of May the water 
was still very high, so that the lower parts of the valley and 
that of the Arkharka were under water, with only small strips 
of land visible here and there. The grass was still very short, 
the leaves of the birch trees very small. Hooded Crows and 
Magpies had eggs highly incubated, or young just hatched; 
