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These are the special features that differentiate Scandinavia from the Falklands, not to speak of the infinite number of birds which rose on my approach, grebe, cormorants, black-headed swans, and above all, tribes of penguins, of which hundreds of thousands are massacred every year.
There was horror in her conjecture, but no pang of affection at the easily divined disclosure. "The news came to us suddenly, yesterday, and Douglas and I are left now to screen ye from the robbers and cormorants of the world! Ye're one of the richest women in Britain now Hugh Fraser's daughter for yere guid father is no more!
One of the characteristic sights we were always seeing was that of a number of heads and necks of cormorants and snake-birds, without any bodies, projecting above water, and disappearing as the steamer approached. Skimmers and thick- billed tern were plentiful here right in the heart of the continent.
He believed that she discovered them within three minutes of their arrival. It seemed not unlikely. In its own way a cat is a pretty sharp ornithologist. One or two cormorants were almost always about the river. Snakebirds and buzzards resort to the same device, but I cannot recall ever seeing any Northern bird thus engaged.
But he only sailed farther, instead of more slowly, gliding in and out among the rocky islands in the light north wind, which, for a wonder, lasted all that day, dappling the bare hills of the Isle of Shadows with a shifting beauty. The tide was in and brimming, the fishing-boats were busy, white gulls soared and clattered round them, and heavy cormorants flapped away as they neared the rocks.
The boat was steered into a narrow channel between two which stood up like the fangs of a great tooth, and afforded a pleasant shade; but there was such a screaming and calling of gulls, terns, cormorants, and all manner of other birds, as they entered the little strait, and such a cloud of them hovered and whirled overhead, that Tam uttered imprecations on their skirling, and bade his companions lie close and keep quiet till they had settled again, lest the commotion should betray that the rocks were the lair of fugitives.
And as I sat on some rocks overlooking the river there occurred to me the thought that, as likely as not, the cause of the gulls' and cormorants' fretful cries where the surf lay moaning behind a belt of trees to the right was that, like myself, they kept mistaking the leaves for fish, and as often finding themselves disappointed.
They were feeding on shoals of mullet, which rushed along the surface of the water, endeavouring to escape the attacks of sharks, porpoises, and other cruel foes beneath the surface. The cormorants, however, did not have it all their own way; for, watching their opportunity, numbers of ospreys and pelicans incessantly splashed down among them to rob them of their prey.
Here too were they in luck if they obtained a few fragments from the grand board; for, such determined voracity was there exhibited, that so many vultures or cormorants could not have been more expeditious in clearing the dishes. For instance, an enormous salmon, which would have done honour to the Tweed or the Severn, graced the middle of the principal table.
The effect was languorous, would have been enervating to the point of mental, as well as physical, inertia had not the posturing cormorants introduced a note of absurdity and the tainted breath of the mud-flats a wholesome reminder of original sin.
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