28 
Mr. Henry Seebohm on the 
relatives, is allowed by courtesy to set up a genus distinct 
from the Chats) acts precisely in the manner described, and 
as it frequents the same locality, it is not unlikely that the 
habits of a female Black Redstart have been transferred to 
the Alpine Accentor. The flight of the latter bird is per¬ 
formed with very pronounced and very short undulations. 
A week afterwards I had an opportunity of watching a pair 
of Alpine Accentors searching for food on the rocks. They 
creep about among the stones, and almost in the same way 
that the Hedge-Sparrow shuffles along amongst the roots 
and the tree-trunks. When they alighted on a rock they 
did so with expanded wings and outspread tail, sometimes 
approaching the ground in a curve, in both particulars 
resembling a Starling. The note was occasionally uttered 
on the wing. 
The Pipit was extremely common on the pastures, and 
still more so on the meadows after the hay had been 
removed. Some of the young seemed to be only recently 
fledged, and their parents were still very anxious about them. 
We devoted nearly an hour to one pair of birds, as their 
actions appeared to signify that the young had not yet left 
the nest. The hen bird had caught a moth, which she was 
anxious to convey to her children, and stood with it in her 
beak, afraid to reveal the whereabouts of her nest. For a 
long time she remained perched on a rock, then occupied 
alternately the summits of two small larches, then returned 
again to the rock, and occasionally flew up to within a few 
yards of where we were sitting, and hovered near us to ex¬ 
amine us more minutely. All this time she kept up, in spite 
of the moth in her beak, her monotonous alarm-note, sit , 
sit, sit , sometimes stopping to call to her mate, who did not 
venture so near us, with a soft ist, ist. She may, after all, 
not have had a nest: at any rate she tired us out, and we gave 
up the quest. 
The Black Redstarts were also very demonstrative, many 
of them having still scarcely fledged young. Their alarm- 
note of tek, tek, tek was very often heard, and not unfre- 
quently their call-note, tzi , tzi } tzi. One of these birds had 
