III.] 
THE SNOWY OWL. 
181 
also tastes differently. For the bird is exceedingly fat, and its 
flesh, as regards flavour, is intermediate between black-cock and 
fat goose.^ We may infer from this that it is a great delicacy. 
When I was returning, in the autumn of 1872, from an ex¬ 
cursion of some length along the shore of Wijde Bay, I fell in 
with one of our sportsmen, who had in his hand a white bird 
THE SNOWY OWE. 
Swedish, Fjelluggla. (Strix nyctea, L.) 
marked with black spots, which he showed me as a very large 
ptarmigan.” In doing so, however, he fell into a great ornitho¬ 
logical mistake, for it was not a ptarmigan at all, but another 
kind of bird, similarly marked in winter, namely, fjellugglan, 
the walrus-hunter’s isoern, the snowy owl {Strix nyctea, L.). It 
evidently breeds and winters at the ptarmigan-fell, which it 
^ Hedenstrom also states {Otryiohi o Sibiri, St. Petersburg, 1830, p. 130,) 
that the ptarmigan winters on the New Siberian Islands, and that there it 
is fatter and more savoury than on the mainland. 
K 2 
