At Tingri we found ourselves in a large plain about 20 miles long by 12 wide; a large part of the plain is saturated with soda and is almost uninhabited by bird or beast. In our three weeks' stay at Tingri we collected several mammals, including a new subspecies of hamster (_Cricetulus alticola tibetanus_) and a number of birds. This was the only place where we ever received any natural history specimen from a Tibetan. A woman came into our camp one day and, after making certain that she was not observed by any of the villagers, produced from a sack a well-worn domestic cat's skin stuffed with grass and a freshly killed stoat (_Mustela longstaffi_). The skin of the stoat is highly prized by the Tibetans, who say that it has the property of restoring faded turquoises to their former beauty. About the houses of the village were nesting tree-sparrows, hoopoes, rock-doves and ravens, the latter so tame that they hardly troubled to get out of the way of passers-by. In a tower of the old fort lived a pair of the Eastern little owl (_Athene bactriana_), which appeared to live principally on voles. On the plain the commonest birds were the long-billed calandra lark, Brook's short-toed lark, the Tibetan skylark, and Elwes' shore-lark, all of which were found with eggs, probably the second brood of the season, at the beginning of July. The nest of the yellow-headed wagtail, rare at Tingri, was found with eggs, and Blanford's snow-finch was found feeding its young more than 2 feet down the burrow of a pika (_Ochotona curzoniae_). The common tern and the greater sand-plover nested on the shingly islands in the river.