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"Why didn't we look at the tide and get home in decent time? It's no good crying over spilt milk!" grunted Merle rather crossly. After that they all subsided into silence for a while. There was no sound except the monotonous lap of the waves. The sea-gulls and cormorants had flown past at sunset and gone to roost.
A group of cormorants, either gorged with mackerel fry or hopeless of an evening meal, perched together at one end of the reef, and stared at the setting sun. A few terns swept round and round overhead, soaring or sliding downwards with easy motion. A large seal lay basking on a bare rock just above the water's edge.
Rubbing my eyes and looking again I perceived with a start and a strange creepy feeling down my back that they WERE men and women! hundreds of them, thousands, all in rows as cormorants stand upon sea-side cliffs, myriads and myriads now I looked about, in every conceivable pose and attitude but never a sound, never a movement amongst the vast concourse.
The waters have their denizens, in the grey Canada and white-fronted geese ducks of numerous species the stupid pelican and shy loon gulls, cormorants, and the noble swan; while the groves of alamo ring with the music of numerous bright-winged songsters, scarcely known to the ornithologist. But no land of peace is this fair region of the Rocky Mountains.
The cormorants, alarmed by the explosions we made, whirled over us continually, like an immense cloud, during the time we troubled their gloomy abode, and seemed to "disturb their solitary reign;" but they did not wish to go far from their nests, in which their young broods were crying out for parental care.
Their business was to guard the scaffolding poles for drying fish against the birds of prey, who had such a villainous trick of hacking at the drying-ropes. The young girl had thick coal-black hair, and a pair of eyes that peeped at folk so oddly. One might almost have said that she was like the cormorants outside there, and she had never seen much else all her life.
The gales of August mattered frightfully to poor Blackburn Tuckham, who was to be dropped at a town in South Wales, and descended greenish to his cabin as soon as they had crashed on the first wall-waves of the chalk-race, a throw beyond the peaked cliffs edged with cormorants, and were really tasting sea. Cecilia reclined on deck, wrapped in shawl and waterproof.
The Ichthyornis type was a tern-like flying bird, with socketed teeth and biconcave vertebrae like the reptile, but otherwise fully evolved into a bird. Its line is believed to survive in the gannets, cormorants, pelicans, and frigate-birds of to-day. The less numerous Hesperornis group were large and powerful divers.
Near the edge, and on the branches of some favourite tree, rest scores of plotuses and cormorants, which stretch their snake-like necks, and in mute amazement turn one eye and then another towards the approaching monster.
One of his rough notes runs thus: "Cormorants resort in enormous nights, coming in the morning from the northward to Callao Bay, and proceeding along shore to the southward, diving in regular succession one after another on the fish which, driven at the same time from below by shoals of porpoises, seem to have no chance but to be devoured under water or scooped up in the large bags pendent from the enormous bills of the cormorants."
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