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Party reported very bad weather since we left, cold blizzard, then continuous S.W. wind with -20° and below. The open water was right up to Hut Point, wind absolutely preventing all freezing along shore. Wilson reported skua gull seen Monday.
And lest he should lose this supply too soon, he was clever enough to cut the wings of the young birds when they were old enough to fly, so that the unsuspecting parents went on feeding them much longer than usual. Mr. Dunn says he once saw, while shooting on Rona's Hill, a pair of skua gulls chase and completely beat off a large sea eagle.
The exercise ground had lain on the boulder-strewn sand of the home beach and extending towards the Skua lake; and across these stretches I soon saw barebacked figures dashing at speed, and not a few amusing incidents in which horse and rider parted with abrupt lack of ceremony.
And all the time the body of the skua floated, and danced, and drifted, and lifted in, making an inch on one wavelet, to lose three-quarters of it on the next, but still, unnoticeably perhaps, but undoubtedly, gradually, surely, for all that, drifting in. Somebody has written somewhere that gulls never touch a carcass on land.
Anyway, whatever we poor mortals may kid ourselves into thinking he did or did not know, or what we may think he ought to have known, he began operations as soon as the skua came alongside, so to speak that is, drifted against the particular bowlder upon which the sphinx-like herring-gull happened by chance always by chance, of course to be standing.
He sprang to strenuous life, and, arriving swiftly at full speed over the spot, snatched up off the surface, and by clumsily attempting to plunge, two more of the sprats, before the skua could intervene.
She revealed for an instant, as she shone on the spot on the sand where the skua had sat, the fact that the sand seemed to be alive, horribly alive, as if the pebbles had taken legs and ran about. It was a sudden, ghastly flashlight, hidden as soon as seen, and it gave one the shudders. Those pebbles were crabs mad with hunger, as crabs always seem to he.
These little birds abound in the pack-ice, but the blue-grey southern fulmar and the Antarctic petrel were also to be seen, and that unwholesome scavenger, the giant petrel, frequently lumbered by; while the skua gull, most pugnacious of bullies, occasionally flapped past, on his way to make some less formidable bird disgorge his hard-earned dinner.
Calcareous lias, slate, and trap are still to be found there, rising from layers of conglomerate, like teeth from a gum; but the pickaxe has broken up and levelled those bristling, rugged peaks which were once the fearful perches of the ossifrage. The summits exist no longer where the labbes and the skua gulls used to flock together, soaring, like the envious, to sully high places.
Then it took in the spotless, gaunt form of the herring-gull, and he remembered that he was a skua, only some twenty-one inches long, 'tis true, but still a skua, to be treated and respected as such.
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