HABITS AND MIGRATION OF THE SNOW BUNTING. 7 
meet, if they do not overlap, and it is reasonable to suppose that 
flocks of either may travel southward in the autumn migration 
into either continent. Our common European bird appears to 
be intermediate in size between this and a smaller race, which in 
Heligoland, as Mr. Giitke has informed me, arrives later than 
the other; he has only once obtained a fine and perfect adult 
specimen. These are not only smaller, but lighter in colour; the 
rusty edges of the upper parts are not so brown as with the bigger 
ones, which holds good throughout all ages. Mr. Gitke further 
remarks, ‘Snow Buntings have of late years decreased here very 
markedly, and really old birds with white wings, except the black 
feathers of the thumb, are very rare, perhaps one in a hundred; 
so are the small race.” Mr. Gitke’s examples of these two races, 
which I have seen in his Heligoland collection, certainly exhibit 
a very marked difference in size. 
The little “‘ Snow-flake” has the pre-eminence of having been 
seen nearer the Pole than any other species. Capt. Markham 
relates how, on the return journey of the sledge party despatched 
in the spring of 1876, in the direction of the North Pole, at atime 
of great suffering, when the exhausted men were in the grasp of 
their deadly foe, the scurvy, a Snow Bunting one day appeared on 
a neighbouring hummock on that vast and dreary Paleocrystic sea, 
and encouraged them to fresh exertions by its cheerful chirrup. 
To the lover of birds dwelling on the east coast there is 
no greater favourite than our “ Snowflake,” for it comes when 
summer birds are gone, in the darkness of the declining year, 
enlivening the bleak coast or marsh with its cheerful call, and 
making beautiful the dreary landscape by the flicker of hundreds 
of white-patched wings; so that, seen against the dark back- 
ground of a lowering sky—which in itself causes the dark portions 
of the plumage to become invisible—it has exactly the appearance 
of those large feather-like and slowly-drifting flakes which herald 
the approaching storm. How much more a favourite should it 
be to those who have watched it in its summer haunts, in the 
sheltered quiet of some Greenland valley, strewed with the yellow 
flowers of the little Arctic poppy, or crimson with blossoms of 
Silene acaulis, that most lovely of northern plants, and there listened 
to the sweet song of the male, trilled out under the midnight sun, 
as, perched on some lichen-spotted boulder or sprig of Arctic 
willow, he serenades in her dark cell his brooding mate. 
