In the company of the purple sandpiper there is often seen a somewhat larger wader, or, more correctly, a bird intermediate between the waders and the swimming birds. This is the beautiful _brednaebbade simsnaeppan_, the grey (or red) phalarope (_Phalaropus fulicarius_, Bonap.). It is not rare on Spitzbergen, and it is exceedingly common, perhaps even the commonest bird on the north coast of Asia. I imagine therefore that it is not absent from Novaya Zemlya, though there has hitherto been observed there only the nearly allied _smalnaebbade simsnaeppan_, the red-necked phalarope (_Phalaropus hyperboreus_, Lath.). This bird might be taken as the symbol of married love, so faithful are the male and female, being continually to be seen in each other's company. While they search for their food in pools of water along the coast, they nearly always bear each other company, swimming in zigzag, so that every now and then they brush past each other. If one of them is shot, the other flies away only for a short time until it observes that its mate is left behind. It then flies back, swims with evident distress round its dead friend, and pushes it with its bill to get it to rise. It does not, however, spend any special care on its nest or the rearing of its young, at least to judge by the nest which Duner found at Bell Sound in 1864. The position of the nest was indicated by three eggs laid without anything below them on the bare ground, consisting of stone splinters. The flesh of the phalarope is a great delicacy, like that of other waders which occur in the regions in question, but which I cannot now stay to describe. During excursions in the interior of the land along the coast, one often hears, near heaps of stones or shattered cliffs, a merry twitter. It comes from an old acquaintance from the home land, the _snoesparfven_ or _snoelaerkan_, the snow-bunting (_Emberiza nivalis_, L.). The name is well chosen, for in winter this pretty bird lives as far south as the snow goes on the Scandinavian peninsula, and in summer betakes itself to the snow limit in Lapland, the _tundra_ of North Siberia, or the coasts of Spitzbergen and Novaya Zemlya. It there builds its carefully-constructed nest of grass, feathers and down, deep in a stone heap, preferably surrounded by a grassy plain. The air resounds with the twitter of the little gay warbler, which makes the deeper impression because it is the only true bird's song one hears in the highest north.[64]