Spitsbergen, Svalbard and Jan Mayen Islands Travel News

Far north of the Arctic Circle, emerging explorer JA rn Hurum coaxes the secrets of evolution from a rocky polar desert with a treasure trove of fossils, including sea monsters of the Jurassic era .

After the ptarmigan love story , in the morning of 3 June 2013, we walked down again to Longyearbyen, the capital of Svalbard.

The book Birds and Mammals of Svalbard , has, on pages 190-191, a list of no less than 59 songbird species, recorded once or more on the islands.

After our journey on 2 June , 3 June is our first full day in Svalbard . Then, and later, we often saw snow buntings, basically the only songbirds of this Arctic archipelago.

But I had never been to the high Arctic so far. The closest I came were the Lofoten islands of Norway, and Iceland , both near the Arctic circle .