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This crowded museum of birds, beasts, and fish skarts, goosanders, sand-grouse, terns, eagles, ospreys, squirrels, foxes, big-snouted trout, harts, hinds, bucks, does, owls, kestrels, falcons, merlins, and every variety of the common gull shot by the all-pervading Cockney staring, stuffed, silent, they were a confusion to the eyes, and nowhere could he find his own, his particular, his precious stag.
Levin Dennis steered close to a point where he had been wont to scatter food for the black ducks, and draw them to the gunner's ambush. Sheldrakes and goosanders, coots and gulls, whifflers and dippers, made the best of Sunday, and bathed and wrote their winged penmanship on the white sheet of water.
It seems to me, as I said before, that these birds seek the more sheltered bays during wild squally weather more than the Goosanders do; not but what they can keep the sea well even in bad weather, but I have never seen or shot the Goosander close to the shore seeking smooth water, as I have done the Red-breasted Merganser.
As soon as the light began to fail I ceased firing and retrieved my birds, which numbered twenty-seven, including several varieties of fish ducks with serrated bills and, as I have subsequently learnt although then mistaking them for large divers, three goosanders.
And after a while the birds began to gather at Allfowlsness, in thousands and tens of thousands, blackening all the air; swans and brant geese, harlequins and eiders, harolds and garganeys, smews and goosanders, divers and loons, grebes and dovekies, auks and razor-bills, gannets and petrels, skuas and terns, with gulls beyond all naming or numbering; and they paddled and washed and splashed and combed and brushed themselves on the sand, till the shore was white with feathers; and they quacked and clucked and gabbled and chattered and screamed and whooped as they talked over matters with their friends, and settled where they were to go and breed that summer, till you might have heard them ten miles off; and lucky it was for them that there was no one to hear them but the old keeper, who lived all alone upon the Ness, in a turf hut thatched with heather and fringed round with great stones slung across the roof by bent-ropes, lest the winter gales should blow the hut right away.
Mallard, teal, dabchicks, and moorhens breed there regularly, and in hard weather a number of rarer birds drop in. Snipe are often seen by one of the shallower ponds, and occasionally such divers as goosanders appear and give an exhibition of fish-catching. These, like the tufted ducks and grebes, are entirely self-supporting.
The heavy-breaking seas of the Channel Islands do not appear to disturb the composure of these birds in the least, for once, on my voyage home on the 16th November, 1871, I saw a small flock of Goosanders off Herm, close to the steamer; they were swimming perfectly unconcerned in a heavy-breaking sea, which made the steamer very lively, dipping first one and then the other paddle-box into the water; as we got close up to them they rose, but only flew a short distance and pitched again in the white water.
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