82 
NATURE NOTES. 
Above the waterways there tower aloft miles of elevated 
snow-fields called Fonds, wherefrom, in the warmth of summer, 
there pour down the Fosses that form one of the glories of the 
land ; and behind these Fonds lie the mountains or hills, termed 
Fjelds, on whose slopes or crests, or in the dales that lie between 
them, breed many such land birds as the woodcock, the fieldfare, 
and the redwing — called by Linnaeus the nightingale of 
Scandinavia — which we welcome to our country before there 
sets in the long, long night of the north. Of the woodcocks we 
see nothing ; in Norway, as in our own countr}^ they are inland 
birds, fond of seclusion. The fieldfares build in colonies, like 
our rooks, mingled now and then with some of their other thrush 
kindred, the redwings ; and these garrulous birds we may some- 
times hear of near the people’s houses. The Norwegians are a 
bird-living folk, and treat their birds very tenderly ; thus it is 
pleasant to find that, in parks or public gardens, as for instance 
in Bergen or Throndhjem, you can get the sparrows to come to 
peck food out of your hand. 
These Bird-rocks usually harbour at breeding-times several 
kinds of birds, but sometimes each is mainl}’ tenanted, by a sort 
of prescriptive right, by one kind alone. 
In the common breeding cliffs, the guillemot and the razorbill — 
which are the mers or divers (mergus) of the Devonian fishermen — 
lays each its large and single egg; and the mother-birds sit so 
close to each other that they often seem to touch as they crowd 
together along the narrow shelf, where the naked bird is hatched 
outside, to encounter, often, the bleak blasts of the north. 
Among these birds, or between them, the puffin digs a hole a 
yard deep, when the spot is soft enough ; and there it hatches a 
single chick, clad in so loose a mass of down that it looks like a 
ball of fluff, wherefrom there projects merely the legs and the 
beak. The difference between the naked razorbill, exposed out- 
side to the rains and snow-squalls, and the downy puffin in its 
maternal hole, is something to astonish us. Amid these birds, 
too, there breed shags, gulls, petrels, and cormorants. 
The largest Bird-rock, Svaerholtklubben, a thousand feet high, 
said to be the largest bird-cliff in the world, is almost entirely 
occupied by the well-known kittiwake {Lartis tridactylus), which 
from its hind toe being a mere knob, is known as the three-toed 
gull. On this cliff the kittiwakes have built their nests for ages 
in prodigious multitudes beyond our power to number ; here 
the nests, built of mingled bents and seaweed, remain from year 
to year on the narrow shelves, to be repaired, like rooks’ nests, 
for each coming season, and added to, till they project, and hang 
on, or droop somewhat like the nests of the cliff-martin. When 
tourists arrive here, a gun is usually let off to arouse the birds, 
whereupon so enormous a cloud often arises that it darkens the 
whole sky. When King Oscar came here in his man-of-war, the 
birds had, in their customary style, like the birds on the “ Devon- 
ian Headland,” got so used to gun-firing as to be almost powder- 
