NURSERIES OF SEA-FOWL.
riF the many people who must admire the flight and the appearance of our seagulls and other aquatic birds, very few, in all probability, give a thought to their ways of life at any other time than that at which they are in evidence, or speculate on their habits at the nesting season, when they are not seen about the coasts in any large numbers except by those who make a special pilgrimage in search of them. Those who do undertake such pilgrimages, generally involving a more or less severe tossing in a small open boat, are rewarded by a spectacle of uvine life in numbers altogether bewildering and in conditions which accentuate the struggle for existence very sharply. At the present time of year most of the fowl are mussed together in certain places well known and recognised as the breeding-grounds of one or of several species. As a rule, these nurseries of the sea-fowl are insular, such as some of the islands of the Scilly group, the outer Farnee off the coast of Northumberland, some isles in Orkney and Shetland, the Baas. Rock, Alice Craig, Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel, and many more. A few lire on the mainland. The vast tonne population gathered into these rem, paratively small limits, and the land-grabbing and congestion which ensue, have to be seen to be appreciated rightly, but it may easily be believed, when one considera the number of the sea, fowl of various kinds on the coasts at times other than the breeding season, and the fact that at this moment their scattered legions are concentrated into comparatively few and strictly circumscribed spaces, that the areas is of necereity dire. The general habit of the fowl is for oath specie*. to appropriate a spot, MOTO often than not a whole island, adapted to its own proclivities, and to resent with vigorous hostility the attempt of any other kind to effect a lodgment on the appropriated soil. It is a tenure not unlike that which must have prevailed among mankind in its primitive social phases. On an island of flat stretches a colony of the lesser black-backed gull may be established; it is thus in the Scilly Islands, in the Fames, and elsewhere. Beside them, on an island more rocky in its nature, you may find the cormorants sitting on their heaped-up nests of sea-wreck; and on another, of very similar character, the lesser cormorant, the crested fellow, who is commonly called the shag, may be established to the exclusion of all other' kinds. Very possibly the gulls will be less exclusive, for it often seems that the ground which suits them for their nesting upon its surface is of that nature which suits the puffins for boring into and laying within the holes. It is of the porous, easily worked quality of soil which is found in a thin layer over the rock on many of the lower islands round the coast, and usually carries a strong growth of sea-campion. In some places, as on Annette Island of the Scillies, the shearwaters live in similar holes, and apparently in quite amicable relations with the puffins; but the shearwaters are much more local, and not nearly so generally distributed at the nesting-time. The gannet, the solan goose, the splendid fisher which dives into the sea on its prey with a vertical plunge which senile up the freming water like a whale spouting, Is associated in popnlar estimation with the Bass Rock particalarly, but ha.9 many other haunts, all rather of a like character, ground the coast, such as Ado Craig, that West Qoast counterpart of the Bass Roek on the East. There are other rooky cliffs which are tenanted solely by the guillemots, an absolute freehold which s secured by the sheer weight of numbers, for the bird* alt se clasely packed that when one arrives it plumps into the middle of those already assembled, communicating a joggling of position to every one of the birds gathered on that particular ledge or table of rock and spreading to the outer edge, off which some other bird has ultimately to be jostled in order to make room for the one which has settled itself thus, with scant ceremony, in the crowded midst. Often in the jostling and change of place an egg will be dislodged from the terrace and dashed to pieces as it falls seawards. There are. those who have written, and there are those who will tell you, that each of these crowded birds knows its own egg and returns to it, guided by unerring Instinct; but it is likely that those who write and those who say these things have never watched the coming and going of the guillemots in a crowded colony. Circumstances may alter cases, and where the congestion is not severe each parent may recognise its own egg and sit upon it with a jealous and particular care ; but in the real stress of a crowd it is very obvious that such parental care of an individual egg is an impossibility. The singular and fortunate disposition of animals to yield to another, even a smaller than themselves, if the latter he in real earnest to defend what it believes to be its rights, and the other has no particular interest in the matter, is seen very well exhibited where a colony of the black-beaded gulls has established itself, and an intruder, in the shape of one of the lesser black-hacked gulls for example, appears idly cruising in the neighbourhood. A favourite nursery of these pretty and graceful little gulls with the black heads, almost tern-like in the elegance of their shape and movements, and tern-like also in the raucous scold of their voices, is a fresh-water pond or lake, in the vicinity of the sea, grown over to a large extent with reeds and rushes. Among the reeds the black-beaded gulls will have their nests, and if such an intruder appears as the black-backed gull they will arise and mob him, flying round and using the worst language that they know. It appears bad in its effect on the bigger gull, which always yields to the clamour and departs beyond the circle which the smaller kind seem to look on as the limit of their domain. It is, indeed, with very good reason that these black-backed gulls are considered suspect, being worse stealers of eggs than even any of the corvine race, which has brought to a fine art the craft of egg-stealing. There is a story, with a moral, of the cormorants which now inhabit, at the nesting-time, that small and southern island of the Fames, hardly more important than a mere rock, called the Megstone. The cormorants are there now, sitting on their nests or feeding their young, at the time of writing, but for the space of two years they entirely deserted that haunt, which had been the nursery of the family for very many generations. The reason, apparently quite adequate, for the desertion was that twice the sea combined its highest tide with the greatest force of the wind and swept the rock, which is well above all ordinary tides, so completely that the nests were carried away, and the cormorants accepted the gentle hint and for two years betook themselves, unwelcome and highly savoury guests, to the highest point on one of the neighbouring islands which was in the tenancy of black-backed gulls. It seems that, arriving as the cormorants did in a considerable body, the gulls had not the strength to repel them, but they kept their own nesting-places outside the centre occupied by the others, and whenever a chance offered, by one of these dark divers leaving its nest with an egg unguarded, the gulls would fall on the egg; and thus the conditions of life for the cormorants, evicted by the stress of weather from their immemorial home and persecuted by the inhospitable natives of the land of their adoption, became very cruel indeed. They have now decided to submit their fate again to the blind forces of sky and sea, returning to the Niegstone, rather than endure longer the intelligent persecution of the egg-stealing gulls. A species which'prolongs its life on the confines of the region that these black-backed gulls have • made their own is the eider- 'duck ; but the life of the ducks is fraught with anxiety, and if they leave their eggs uncovered for cnly a very short while -the gulleare sure to have them. An exception would almost :seem to be made, by those omnivorous thieves, in favour of the oyster-catcher, for this little bird may be seen going about 'in the creeping and self-effacing manner which it affects in the neighbourhood of its nest (or rather of its eggs, for the 'nest is a negligible quantity) in the very midst of all the gulls, and its eggs appear to be respected by them. Like as these dappled eggs are to the pebbles among .which they are often laid, it is not to be thought that the similarity would defeat the vision Of the quick-eyed gulls. There are many. of the wading birds, besides the oyster-catcher, whose .eggs are almost impossible to detect, 'by the . human eye which has had no training in the craft. Such are the eggs of the ringed-plover, of the sandpiper, and again, paising to another genus, of the tern, which lay on the shingly fringes between sea and land. They are exclusive, too, but they admit cousins-german into', fellowship of nursery, common tern and Arctic tern ,(the latter often more common than the former), nesting side by aide and laying eggs hardly to be dis- tinguished from each other, and neither at all easy toresogniie from the almost' identically Coloured pebbles around' them. One of the widing species, the redshank, you 'may find in great numbers in a locality snail- as the lands adjoining the lake of the black-headed gulls.. As you walk, with perfectly Innocent purpose, near their homes, the will come hovering, head to 'wind, about you, uttering a plaintive, piping 'protest, often accompanied, , much in the 'same strain, by 'the green plover making complaint' nf you similarly';' or they will perch on some outstanding post or rock for better convenience, of scolding. It is not necessary to refer. to that one 'rocky_ islet in the North which is the sole British home, as we are told. of the bonxie, or great slum, nor to the fulmar-petrel, restricted to St. Kilda amongst our islands, to show the extreme jealousy of the different kinds of sea-fowl. in choosing and keeping .their respective sites for the domestic dramas; and when the myriads are seen which throng roek, sky, and sea alike in' the 'vicinity of these chosen spots, there is no longer cause to wonder that at the breeding-time the sea-birds are not as numerously present as usual about the coasts generally, but rather that, nesting as they do in such legions on these selected sites, they do not appear even more multitudinous when they and their young ones 'disperse from them over 'the wide seas.
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