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Along the shore, too, there is life; guillemot, oyster-catcher, tern are busy there; the wagtail is out in search of food, advancing in little spurts, trim and pert with its pointed beak and swift little flick of a tail; after a while it flies up to perch on a fence and sing with the rest. But when the sun has set, may come the cry of a loon from some hill-tarn; a melancholy hurrah.
Straight an oyster-catcher thrust in his bill to eat the mussel; which promptly snapped the shell to and held the bird fast. 'If it doesn't rain today or tomorrow, said the oyster-catcher, 'there'll be a dead mussel here. 'And if you don't get out of this by today or tomorrow, said the mussel, 'there'll be a dead oyster-catcher. Meanwhile up came a fisherman and carried them both off.
It has an orange bill and feet; and is not seen 4 in the back country during the winter. The red-bill is, I believe, identical with the oyster-catcher of the Cornish coast. It has a long orange bill, and orange feet, and is black and white over the body. The sand-piper is very like the lark in plumage. The quail is nearly exterminated.
Perhaps he may wait for an hour or even two hours and see nothing, not even an oyster-catcher. Then at last from miles away comes the faint wild call of curlew on the wing. He strains his eyes, the call comes nearer, but nothing can he see. At last, seventy yards or more to the right, he catches sight of the flicker of beating wings, and, like a flash, they are gone.
The most remarkable of the Persian birds are the eagle, the vulture, the cormorant, the falcon, the bustard, the pheasant, the heath-cock, the red-legged partridge, the small gray partridge, the pin tailed grouse, the sand-grouse, the francolin, the wild swan, the flamingo, the stork, the bittern, the oyster-catcher, the raven, the hooded crow, and the cuckoo.
I never tire of watching how the lonely white heron spears his scaly prey, how the clapper-rail floats on his raft of matted rushes, how the marsh-wren jerks his saucy little tail over his bottle-shaped nest, or how with quick and certain stroke the oyster-catcher extracts the juicy "native" from his bivalved citadel.
The place was very still, though now and then would come the cry of a bird from the crags that beetled above me, and from the shore the pipe of a tern or oyster-catcher. An owl hooted from somewhere up on the tower. That I reckoned was Wake, so I hooted back and was answered.
Our old friend, the black and white red-bill, or oyster-catcher, was in readiness to greet us, accompanied by a few families of sanderlings, two or three batches of grey plovers, and a couple of small curlews. Crossing the beach, a line of reddish sandstone cliffs, twelve feet in height, was ascended, and found to face a bank of sand, held together by a sort of coarse spinifex.
The incessant assaults of the sea have cut deep but narrow clefts in the granite, worn out sounding hollows, and smoothed away angularities. Here a few terns rear their young, and succeeding generations of the sooty oyster-catcher lay their eggs just out of the reach of high-tide.
Fish would be required for the otters, minks, pelicans, of which there are eight species, and must therefore have been fifty-six individuals in the ark; one hundred and five gulls, for there are fifteen species; one hundred and twelve cormorants, forty-nine gannets, one hundred and forty terns, two hundred and eighty-seven kingfishers, beside storks, herons, spoonbills, penguins, albatrosses, and a host of others; mollusks for the oyster-catcher, turnstone, and other birds.
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