BIRDS OF NEW ZEALAND NOT FIGURED BY BULLER. 
the long grass with my foot. When frightened up from the nest the bird for 
a short while lay screaming and flapping on the water not far from me ; there¬ 
upon he flew away, silently and rapidly, to land on the opposite side of the 
lake. Having been absent for some five minutes he returned just as rapidly, 
flew a good way to the other side of the nest, sat down, and kept quiet for a 
couple of minutes, whereafter he again flew up and took the earth some 20 metres 
from the nest, which he then rapidly approached, walking and swimming, 
hidden by aquatic plants and tufts. All this was done in order to mislead 
me, who was lying some 15 metres from the nest without any shelter and 
therefore seen by the bird all the viiile. 
“ The nest is always in the grass, never in the black or mossy portions of 
the tundra, and usually hi a pretty wet situation, though a nest w r as occasionally 
found high and dry in a place where the nest of the Pectoral Sandpiper would 
be looked for. A favourite nesting-site was a narrow grassy isthmus between 
two of the shallow' ponds. The nest is a very slight affair of dried grass and 
always w r ell concealed. 
“ Young. Mr. Conover writes to me that ‘ a nest located June 10th, with 
three eggs, hatched on June 29th’. Incubation is performed almost wholly by 
the male, but Mr. Brandt (MSS.) says : ‘ The female, kow r ever, is of course 
the dominant member of the household, but she occasionally shares the cares 
of incubation, as I proved by collecting one from the nest; while later in the 
year I was successful in photographing a mother with a single chick’. Most 
observers agree that the male assumes full care of the young also; but Miss 
Haviland (1915) says : * It seems as if both male and female unite to care 
for the young, and when the breeding-ground is approached they fly around 
and call anxiously.’ Probably the gaily dressed female is a poor mother at 
best and prefers to join the large flocks of her sex on the tundra pools. 
“ Plumages . The downy young Red Phalarope is the handsomest of its 
group, darker and more richly coloured as well as larger than the young 
Northern Phalarope. The upper-parts show various shades of deep, warm, 
brownish-buff, darkest ‘ Sudan brown ’ on the crown, paling to ‘ raw sienna ’ 
on the sides of the head, occiput, neck, thighs and rump and to * yellow ochre ’ 
on the rest of the upper-parts ; these colours shade off into ‘ antimony-yellow ’ 
or £ warm buff ’ on the throat and breast and to buffy-white on the belly; 
the down of the upper-parts is tipped with black, except on the yellow ochre 
parts and is basally dusky. It is boldly marked above with clear, velvety 
black ; there is a large black patch back of the central crown patch of brown 
and a diminishing black stripe on each side of it; a narrow black stripe runs 
from the bill, over the eye, to the auriculars ; another runs across the liincl 
neck ; a broad, but more or less broken and irregular, black stripe extends 
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