Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 1 (1897).djvu/52

26 The Wagtails seen were old and young birds of the universal Motacilla alba, and once in the north the dark-headed Yellow Wagtail, M. borealis of Sundeval, with almost black crown and no eye-streak.

The only notice I have of Fieldfares, besides a few near Voss, was seeing a small flock flying over the birch wood on the hill-side leading up to the foot of the Svartisen glacier in the Holandsfjord. This I think must be the very same wood in which Messrs. Pearson and Bidwell found the Icterine Warbler's nest in June, 1894. It is a charming wilderness of birch, covering rocky ground, on the hill slope, and with a wealth of ferns, meadow-sweet, rose-bay, golden-rod, and aconite, all the flowering plants in full bloom, also the very finest and largest clusters of hairbells (Campanula rotundifolia) I have ever seen in any part of Europe. Through a canopy of golden-green foliage, lighted by a brilliant sunshine, you got upward glimpses of the great glacier, sweeping downwards from an ice-field of over forty miles in extent. The colour of the ice is a pale malachite-green and crossed with gaping crevasses of cobalt. On the terminal moraines of the glacier our party collected a large number of arctic plants. The Trout were rising everywhere along the shore of the fjord, and made one long for a trout-rod and handy boat.

Nothing struck me more in Arctic Norway than the enormous extent of the birch forests, filling the valleys and clothing the sides of the mountains, till they give place to cold grey rock and a sparse vegetation, with long streaks and patches of pallid snow, carrying the eye forward and upward into the interminable ice-plateaux and the grey-blue shadow-lands of the higher ranges. There seems to be everywhere, both inland and on the bleak tundra, on the shore of the Arctic Ocean, room for all the birds in Europe to nest and enjoy the long summer day of those high latitudes. Unfortunately the time allotted to us did not permit much inland exploration.

Some other birds in my list are a flight of about fifty Greenshanks at Vadsö coming down from the tundra to the shore, some Golden Plover in the same place, and a good many Redshanks. At Voss, and between Bergen and Voss (where I was staying from Aug. 10th to 17th), I noted several Herons, quite a large flock of Woodlarks on some firs by the side of the river, and