8936 Birds. 
found in Greenland. The fourth and fifth are most unquestionably 
distinct species ; and both are found breeding over a good part of the 
‘arctic portion of the New World, while neither occurs in the rest of 
Europe, except accidentally. Iam only aware of one species which 
does not properly belong to Europe, and which yet occurs frequently 
in Iceland without breeding there—this is the Greenland falcon. 
Before proceeding to a detailed and technical list of the birds of 
Iceland, the reader of this work might perhaps wish to have placed 
before him a sort of general summary of the Ornithology of the 
country ; for it always happens that many of the species which swell 
the bulk of a local catalogue make but little show in the eyes of a 
traveller, and are entirely wanting in the pictures which memory recalls 
to his mind. To begin then with the falcons, which (for so many 
centuries more highly prized than any others by all the nations of 
Europe) are yet to be found in greater plenty in Iceland than else- 
where, and are as much sought for by collectors now as formerly by 
kings or emperors. Almost exterminated in the British islands, in 
Iceland the whitetailed eagle is still constantly seen perched in solitary 
grandeur on the rocky shore, while the courageous little merlin glides 
over the hill-tops, striking fear and silence into the titlark and the 
_wheatear, the white wagtail and the snow bunting. Wherever the 
birch or the willow attains the height of a man, there may the mono- 
tonous twitter of the redwing, followed by a low inward warble, be 
heard by the traveller. Companies of ravens throng every fishing 
settlement, and obtain a plentiful subsistence from the offal by which 
it is surrounded. The ptarmigan, as I have above said, in plumage if 
not in species distinct from that which haunts the mountains of Scot- 
land, the fjelds of Norway, or the Alps and Pyrenees of Southern 
Europe, utters its strange guttural croak among the contorted slabs of 
the lava streams. Where the turf is softest and greenest, the golden 
plover, by its tameness, provokes the passer-by to unsling his gun— 
unless, indeed, his hunger being satisfied (not an every-day event in 
Iceland), he is disposed to take a more merciful view of its familiarity. 
Along the shore, flocks of wheeling turnstones, ring dotterells, dunlins, 
and other less common kinds of sandpipers, attract the attention of 
even the most unobservant. The merry whistle of the redshank con- 
trasts with the discontented wail of the wary whimbrel, as, keeping 
well out of shot, he rises lightly from the barren moor. While from 
the marsh the “zick zack, zick zack” of the snipe sounds cheerily, 
and suggests to the sportsman recollections of former, or visions of 
future, visits to some well-remembered bog or fen, far away across the 
