21 



round in circles for a long time, so high up in the air, that he 

 sometimes is lost to sight. 



If we approach the small pools of water, which occur here and 

 there in the heathery spots, or upon the more grassy places, we 

 shall soon pull up near a pair of small waders, which are fairly 

 common here, and whose life-history and habits are well worth 

 our attention. 



Already, before we go ashore, we have noticed a wisp of 

 small Sandpipers, which unlike all their relations, do not keep on 

 land, but swim about near the shore, diving with their little head 

 and slender beak, and constantly bringing up from beneath 

 the surface some crustacean or some other lower form of life 

 which is invisible to us. This is the Red-necked Phalarope 

 (Phalaropus hyperboreus), which with the slender form of body of 

 the Sandpiper, has acquired as close a covering of feathers as a 

 duck, and for whom the water is the more proper element. Often 

 they may be found in flocks on the sea far from land, rocking 

 upon the surface in the strongest swell, like small specks of foam. 

 But in the small tarns up in the interior of the country, between 

 the leaves of Comarum, Menyanthes and Hippuris, we may be able 

 to find their nest, or meet with the four delicately-formed brown- 

 ish yellow young in down, being conducted by one of the parents 

 among the water plants. 



This one of the parents is, as is well known to the majority 

 of my readers, always the male. With the utmost indifference 

 to danger, he runs, anxiously screaming, directly in front of our 

 feet, to divert our attention from the eggs or the small young. 

 The females, on the contrary, which are a little larger, and 

 purer coloured, keep themselves to themselves during the nest- 

 ing season, and generally form the little flocks which we have 

 seen floating about on the small pools of water, or in the sea 

 close to shore, far removed from the burden of family life. Here 

 the plainly-coloured male is the weaker sex, which must wholly 

 and entirely undertake the hatching of the eggs and the bringing 

 up of the young. This trait is by no means peculiar to this 

 species, although hardly in any other case to so great an extent 

 as the present, where it also takes expression in the colour of 

 the male. It is more or less conspicuous with most of our arctic 



