A Summer on the Yenesei (1914)

ISBN: 9781333757687 出版年：2018 页码：388 Maud D Haviland Forgotten Books

Anyone who writes about the birds of Yenesei, now adays, does so with diffidence, for the recollection of the Birds of Siberia is always present with him, like a critic standing at his shoulder. But the journey down the river is shorter than it was in Seebohm's time, and therefore there is less opportunity to observe the birds and men who live along the banks; for twigo'i and tundra slide past as quickly as at a kinematograph show. There is more scope at Golchika, and there, if wishes might have found place, I should like to have woven a little of the spell of the tundra into these lines of print — the voices of the wild-fowl calling up the summer, the poppies above the snowdrifts, the smell of driftwood fires, and the squelch of the rein deer's little hoofs in the moss. But this book has no pretension to such art. It contains merely some pages from the journal of a season spent among birds, which, for the most part, are known in this country only on migration or as vagrants.