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Updated: June 24, 2025
Cuthbert's peace;" above all to the eider-ducks, which swarmed there in his days, but are now, alas! growing rarer and rarer, from the intrusion of vulgar sportsmen who never heard St. Cuthbert's name, or learnt from him to spare God's creatures when they need them not.
There was misty frost, the night, and stillness outside the stillness that whispers of death. Wolves crept up to the plot of land, sat on their hind-legs and howled long and dismally at the sky. In the spring the shores of the river were strewn with wild flocks of swans, geese, and eider-ducks. The forest resounded with the stir of the beasts.
On the whole, I may perhaps have seen from one hundred to a hundred and fifty nests. The most remarkable circumstance connected with the eider-ducks is their tameness during the period of incubation. I had always regarded as myths the stories told about them in this respect, and should do so still had I not convinced myself of the truth of these assertions by laying hands upon the ducks myself.
There were ducks and geese of various kinds, and innumerable quantities of plover, cormorants, gulls, and eider-ducks, the eggs of which they found in thousands. Many of these birds were good for food, and the eggs of most of them, especially those of the eider-duck, were excellent.
This, in its turn, seemed to rouse the eider-ducks that thronged the island; and their clatter and commotion was so great overhead that any spectator might have been excused for believing that Vogel islet was indeed bewitched. "Humph!
Solan-geese, eider-ducks, and sea-gulls cover the dizzy heights overhead, and whales have been known to pass through the passage below. Great numbers of blackfish and porpoises abound in this vicinity.
There were also a great number of eider-ducks flying about, but they failed to procure a specimen. Singleton was equally successful in his scientific researches.
When the ram walked to the very edge of the mountain roof, so the boy could look down the mountain walls, he noticed that they were simply filled with birds' nests; and in the blue sea beneath him, lay surf-scoters and eider-ducks and kittiwakes and guillemots and razor-bills so pretty and peaceful busying themselves with fishing for small herring. "This is really a favoured land," said the boy.
He turns his back upon the bright, beautiful sea, tufted with cakes of ice that seem in the distance like the white, pure lilies on a glassy pond, and paddles off home with good-by to the fishing, good-by to the black-headed seals, good-by to the low islands with their gulls and mollimucks and burgomeisters and tern and kittiwakes and eider-ducks good-by to the long day's fun!
They had never seen any like them before; but Frank knew in a moment, from descriptions he had often read, that they were eider-ducks, and he determined, if possible, to capture some of the young ones, which, he noticed, were but half-fledged, and too small to fly. But the question was how to proceed.
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