United States or Liberia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Or I watch Herring-Gulls returning to the breeding station at Bolt Head, an endless stream of individuals coming from the east as far as eye can reach; following them for some miles inland I see them still, first as specks upon the horizon, then passing beside me as they beat their way slowly against the strong south-westerly winds, and finally disappearing from view in the direction of the cliffs.
He had got three mussels; a muddy face; muddier feet; nearly an eye pecked out by a mighty, great black-backed gull; three chivyings from herring-gulls; one nip from a crab who ought to have been dead; two winkles under big stones that took half-an-hour to shift; one dead pigmy shrew length two inches with a hole in its skull, no brains, and a horrible smell; nearly his life removed by the swoop of a kestrel falcon and the javelin-stab of a heron's beak; and twenty minutes' hard cleaning to remove the mud-stains that were not properly off to his nice liking yet.
Here the herring-gulls had the rock to themselves, and looked their best in their foam-white and pearl-grey plumage and yellow legs and beaks. While I watched them they watched me; not gathered in groups, but singly or in pairs, scattered up and down all over the face of the precipice above me, perched on ledges and on jutting pieces of rock.
And as the birds breed in communities, often very populous, and all clamour together, the effect of so many powerful and unisonant voices is very grand; but it differs in the two species, owing to the quality of their voices being different; the storm of sound produced by the black-backs is deep and solemn, while that of the herring-gulls has a ringing sharpness almost metallic.
Again they will fly low, wheeling and screaming, their wild sea-voices shrill with the sound of storm. If it is thick and gray overhead, the snow-white bodies of the herring-gulls toss in the wind above the roofs like patches of foam. I hear the sea the wind, the surf, the wild, fierce tumult of the shore whenever the white gulls sail screaming into my winter sky.
There the sea-parrots breed, and so thickly that you can scarcely set foot ashore without plunging into their houses; but there is a mound near the western end where no sea-parrot may come, for the herring-gulls and the black-backs claim it for their own.
This sudden robust life, following the routine of our subdued company on its lonely and disappointed vigils in a deserted sea, the cheery men countering and mocking aloud the sly tricks of their erratic craft, a multitude of masts and smoking funnels around us swaying in various arcs against a triumphant sky, the clamorous desperation of clouds of wheeling kittiwakes, herring-gulls, black-backed gulls and gannets, and all in that pour of hard and crystalline northern sunlight, was as though the creative word had been spoken only five minutes before.
The sea-birds had evidently imagined that it was put up expressly for their benefit; for a number of cormorants and large herring-gulls had taken up their quarters on it finding it, no doubt, conveniently near to their fishing-grounds. A critical inspection of all its parts showed that everything about it was in a most satisfactory state.
To catch one of these was Murphy's aim, and often was he washed out on to the sands in a smother of spindrift, in his mad eagerness to attain his end. The herring-gulls were the finest sport of all, with their constant melancholy cries "pew-il," "pee-ole," or their hoarser note of warning, "kak-k-kak"; their bodies two feet in length; their spread of wing no less than four feet four.
Their only shadow was the herring-gulls, and the herring-gulls, being amateur, not professional, pirates, were too clumsy to worry too much. Then came the rain-shower. Not that there was anything in that. Rain-showers came to that land as easily as blushes used to do to maidens' cheeks rain-showers, and sudden squalls, and all manner of swift storm phenomena.
Word Of The Day