From the Animal World of Novaya Zemlya--The Fulmar Petrel-- The Rotge or Little Auk--Brünnich's Guillemot--The Black Guillemot--The Arctic Puffin--The Gulls--Richardson's Skua-- the Tern--Ducks and Geese--The Swan--Waders--The Snow Bunting--The Ptarmigan--The Snowy Owl--The Reindeer--The Polar Bear--The Mountain Fox--The Lemming--Insects-- The Walrus--The Seal--Whales.
If we do not take into account the few Samoyeds who of recent years have settled on Novaya Zemlya or wander about during summer on the plains of Vaygats Island, all the lands which in the old world have formed the field of research of the Polar explorer--Spitzbergen, Franz-Josef Land, Novaya Zemlya, Vaygats Island, the Taimur Peninsula, the New Siberian Islands, and perhaps Wrangel's Land also--are uninhabited. The pictures of life and variety, which the native, with his peculiar manners and customs, commonly offers to the foreigner in distant foreign lands, are not to be met with here. But, instead, the animal life, which he finds there in summer--for during winter almost all beings who live above the surface of the sea disappear from the highest North--is more vigorous and perhaps even more abundant, or, to speak more correctly, less concealed by the luxuriance of vegetation than in the south.
It is not, however, the larger mammalia--whales, walruses, seals, bears and reindeer--that attract attention in the first place, but the innumerable flocks of birds that swarm around the Polar traveller during the long summer day of the North.
Long before one enters the region of the Polar Sea proper, the vessel is surrounded by flocks of large grey birds which fly, or rather hover without moving their wings, close to the surface of the sea, rising and sinking with the swelling of the billows, eagerly searching for some eatable object on the surface of the water, or swim in the wake of the vessel in order to snap up any scraps that may be thrown overboard. It is the Arctic _stormfogel_[60] (Fulmar, "Mallemuck," "Hafhaest," _Procellaria glacialis_, L.). The fulmar is bold and voracious, and smells villanously, on which account it is only eaten in cases of necessity, although its flesh, if the bird has not recently devoured too much rotten blubber, is by no means without relish, at least for those who have become accustomed to the flavour of train oil, when not too strong. It is more common on Bear Island and Spitzbergen than on Novaya Zemlya, and scarcely appears to breed in any considerable numbers on the last-named place. I know three places north of Scandinavia where the fulmar breeds in large numbers: the first on Bear Island, on the slopes of some not very steep cliffs near the so-called south harbour of the island,[61] the second on the southern shore of Brandywine Bay on North-East Land, the third on ledges of the perpendicular rock-walls in the interior of Ice Fjord. At the two latter places the nests are inaccessible. On Bear Island, on the other hand, one can without very great difficulty plunder the whole colony of the dirty grey, short eggs, which are equally rounded at both ends. The eggs taste exceedingly well. The nest is very inconsiderable, smelling badly like the bird itself.