a7 
warm hollows, that indent the slopes of North Cape towards the 
south,—find a couple of well-known species of birds, which 
attend us in all parts of the land. One of these is the Cuckoo, 
which in these regions entrusts its eggs to the Pipits and the 
Wheatear; the other is the Willow- Warbler (Phylloscopus trochilus), 
which, in the highest willow thicket that even here manages to 
sustain life, executes its somewhat tedious song as indefati- 
gably as it does in the beech-woods of Central Europe. Its nest, 
as round as a ball, and which in these storm-vexed parts is large 
and fluffy, is lined with a handful of the white winter-feathers of 
Willow Grouse. Its relation, the Chiffchaff (Phylloscopus rufus), 
on the contrary, hardly goes further north than Saltdalen, only a 
little way beyond the Arctic circle. 
We quit the plateau again, and go slowly down thonen the 
steep cleft in the mountain, where the path winds among loose 
stones and snow-fields. From high up the precipice are heard 
the melancholy notes of a solitary bird, which sound almost 
like the cry of a young bird separated from its mother. That 
is the Ring Ouzel (Turdus torquatus), which sings to his mate, 
whilst she is sitting on her brown-speckled eggs under a tussock 
of grass up on the mountain, or is engaged in rearing her young. 
The most emphatically Arctic representative in the group of 
small birds, is the Snow Bunting (Plectrophanes nivalis). On the 
precipice of North Cape, and on the stacks furthest out to sea, 
upon the plateaux in the interior, and upon the archipelagoes 
of the Arctic Ocean, everywhere one finds scattered pairs of 
these birds established, whose simple summer plumage, composed 
of pure black and pure white, harmonises so remarkably with 
the ground that they have chosen to inhabit. From one of 
the dark boulders, alternating with the snow-drifts which the 
short summer is unable to thaw, or from the highest point of 
such a snow-field, the male during the nesting season sings his 
pretty and variable song, sounding quite cheerful in the dreary 
surroundings; then he flies down among the stones, and comes 
back shortly with his beak full of insects, especially of the large 
Cranefly (Tipula), to feed his sitting mate or the young under 
the slab of stone. 
We have again reached the foot of the Cape, where our 
2 
