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Updated: May 31, 2025
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.
Out on the beach there was nothing, nothing but the breaking sea and the flying gulls and lines of long legged gulls stalking or standing on the sands, the 'get-away get-away' of the kittiwakes came across the water and the barking of brent geese from beyond the rocks of the Lizard Point. The boat lay there on its side, everything was the same. She drew towards the caves. Nothing stirred there.
The gulls and kittiwakes rose and fell, uttering their peevish wails; a large shoal of fish fretting the radiant surface of the sea was passed and about a dozen porpoises went right across the cutter's bow, rising and diving down one after the other like so many black water-boys, playing at "Follow my leader;" but the eyes of all on board the Kestrel were fixed upon the dingy looking chasse maree, which apparently still kept on trying hard to escape by its speed.
Captain Hubback, however, informed me that a few were breeding on the rocks to the south of Alderney in 1878, but when Mr. Howard Saunders and I went with him to the spot on the 25th June, we found no Kittiwakes there, all those Captain Hubback had previously seen having probably departed to their breeding-stations before our visit, and after they had been seen by him some time in May.
But jist think what a gran' place it wad be to bide in!" The marquis burst out laughing. "A grand place for gulls and kittiwakes and sea crows!" he said. "But where is it, pray, that a fisherman like you gets such extravagant notions? How do you come to think of such things?" "Thoucht's free, my lord. Gien a thing be guid to think, what for sudna a fisher lad think it?
Here and there a few scattered reeds, or an unhealthy greenish scum upon the mud, gave a touch of colour to the scene; but for the most part the great plain was all of the same sombre mud tint, with its monotony broken only by the white flecks where the swarms of gulls and kittiwakes had settled in the hope of picking up whatever had been left by the receding tide.
Thousands and thousands of them perch and chatter on the rocks and fly screaming in the air, amongst them being guillemots, kittiwakes, gulls, terns, cormorants, puffins, and eider-ducks, for which latter St. Cuthbert is said to have had great affection; certainly they are the gentlest of these wild sea-fowl.
We saw very large flocks of kittiwakes, some of the whales called finners, and, as we supposed, a few also of the black kind, together with multitudes of porpoises. On the morning of the 24th, notwithstanding the continuance of a favourable breeze, we met, in the latitude of 58½°, so heavy a swell from the north-eastward as to make the ship labour violently for four-and-twenty hours.
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