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Updated: May 19, 2025
All travellers in the north of Europe speak of the gnat and the mosquito as very serious drawbacks upon the enjoyments of the summer tourist, who visits the head of the Gulf of Bothnia to see the midnight sun, and the brothers Laestadius regard them as one of the great plagues of sub-arctic life. Not only man, but cattle, and even birds and wild beasts, suffer intolerably from their bite."
But though we have no evidence that man has exterminated many species of birds, we know that his persecutions have caused their disappearance from many localities where they once were common, and greatly diminished their numbers in others. The younger Laestadius frequently notices the tjader, in his very remarkable account of the Swedish Laplanders.
Perhaps the half-wild character ascribed by P. Laestadius and other Swedish writers to the reindeer of Lapland, may be in some degree due to the comparative shortness of the period during which he has been partially tamed. The domestic swine bred in the woods of Hungary and the buffalo of Southern Italy are so wild and savage as to be very dangerous to all but their keepers.
The forest, indeed, rapidly recovers itself, but it is a generation or more before the reindeer-moss grows again. When the forest consists of pine, tall, the ground, instead of being rendered fertile by this process, becomes hopelessly barren, and for a long time afterwards produces nothing but weeds and briers. Laestadius, Om Uppodlingar i Lappmarken, p. 15.
Torfmossar, called also Mossmyror and Snottermyror, and, 2. Bjornmossar. Trask are pools fed by bogs, or water emanating from them, and their bottoms are slimy; Tjernar are small Trask situated within the limits of Mossar. L.L. Laestadius, om Mojligheten af Uppodlingar i Lappmarken, pp. 23, 24.
The tjader, though not a bird of passage, is migratory, or rather wandering in domicile, and appears to undertake very purposeless and absurd journeys. "When he flits," says Laestadius, "he follows a straight course, and sometimes pursues it quite out of the country. It is said that, in foggy weather, he sometimes flies out to sea, and, when tired, falls into the water and is drowned.
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