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Updated: May 20, 2025
If we study the bird population at one of the breeding stations on the coast, we find, generally speaking, that each kind of bird inhabits a particular portion of the cliff; on the lower ledges are the Guillemots and Kittiwake Gulls; higher up are Razorbills and Fulmars, and at the top, where the cliff is broken and the face of the rock covered with turf and soil, the Puffin finds shelter for its egg.
Because of this habit, some people call him the Sea-crow. At all seaside places you find him, and there he fights for his meals with the Herring Gull, the Common Gull, the Kittiwake and others.
They had duly admired The Kittiwake in the harbour, and they simply longed to go on board. It seemed so particularly tempting when they had such a cordial invitation, and so aggravating to be obliged to decline. "Cousin Nora's very nervous," urged Mavis in extenuation. "She'd be afraid of our being drowned if we went on a duck-pond." Bevis passed over the slur on his seamanship.
And, soon after the mate had come aboard, "the Cap'n" went ashore. And then Mr. Topper laid himself out for some tranquil enjoyment, on quite an unusual scale. He unfastened the package, produced a gramophone, brought it on to the deck, and started "The Washington Post." "Kittiwake Jack" and Bill Brown immediately fled below.
Far out over the gray sea they flew, secure from the range of our gun. We waited long for their return, but only an occasional kittiwake soared high above us, and some, bolder than the rest, presently returned to their brooding places on the cliffs. We could not think of firing while the gulls were on the wing, they swept past us so quickly.
From Bevis arrived a wooden box containing a kittiwake, which he had stuffed himself, with wings outspread. There was a hook in its back so that it could be suspended by a piece of thread from the ceiling to look as if it were flying. In its beak Bevis had placed a note. "I didn't shoot it," he explained. "I know you hate to think of any one killing them.
Mysie had come home, very brown, fuller of Scott than ever for her mother, and of Hugh Miller for Fergus, for whom she had brought so many specimens that Cousin Rotherwood declared that she would sink the Kittiwake.
"Grief," he mourned, "you've got my goat, you've got my proud goat, and you've got it permanently, I'm afraid." On a sultry tropic day, when the last flicker of the far southeast trade was fading out and the seasonal change for the northwest monsoon was coming on, the Kittiwake lifted above the sea-rim the jungle-clad coast of Francis Island.
The two women were upstairs in Alice's white and blue sitting-room enjoying a wood fire. Jim and Derry were in the playroom with Kittiwake; the house was silent, so silent that they could hear the drumming of rain on the leads, and the lazy purr of the fire. Alice was first incredulous, and then stunned at the story.
The struggle for reproduction is nowhere more severe than amongst the cliff-breeding sea birds; it is not for nothing that one sees Kittiwake Gulls, locked together, fall into the water hundreds of feet below and struggle to the point of exhaustion, or, as has been reported, to the point of death; it is not for nothing that Puffins fight with such desperation.
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