THE following lines of Spenser’s, though multitudes have been written upon the eagle, have never been improved upon:

“Sailing with supreme dominion, through the azure deep of air”—“Eagles, golden-feathered, who do tower above us in their beauty, and must reign, in right thereof,”—but it is no use to go on quoting, for the poets’ tributes to their flight alone would fill many pages. To feel the full force of them, to understand how little exaggeration there is in them, one must have seen an eagle, unconscious of observation, at its ease in the air.

I remember how once in India I enjoyed the splendid sight of an “ossifrage” launching itself from its seat upon a huge dead tree into the valley. Something below had attracted its attention, a kite perhaps, or a crow, flying towards carrion, and the enormous bird came hurtling down with a veritable crash of its wings. And then suddenly it checked itself in its fall, and opening its “broad sails” to the utmost, till each feather stood apart from the other, it silently floated away across the valley. The speed of its flight was prodigious, but it was absolutely noiseless, and the great thing, once launched, never moved a feather, but sped away in a straight level line, as if under the attraction of some invisible, irresistible magnet, to a gorge on the other side, and so disappeared from view.

It was a most noble and a memorable performance. First the instant of impetuous downward plunge, so headlong that the wind fairly rattled through its plumage; and then, with such spectral suddenness, the recovery of position, and the imperial tranquillity of its horizontal flight. When the eagle’s wings are fully extended, the tips of the long feathers curve slightly upwards, giving a singular grace to its flight and a very curious impressiveness to the bird’s appearance,

The largest eagle we have in Great Britain is the erne or white-tailed eagle—the sea-eagle. Not that it fishes for its food; indeed, it seldom eats fish unless it happens to rob another bird. But it levies toll upon the sea-birds themselves, harrying the guillemot and puffin, and making them its prey. By preference it builds upon the loftiest crags on the stormiest shores, but if it can find rocks inland that are rugged enough, and that overlook some stretch of water where the wild-fowl come, it will build its eyrie there, and scourge the surrounding country (not sparing the sheepfolds), to supply its young.

They are not uncommon in the wildest parts of Scotland and Ireland, and though, of course, persecuted everywhere, they succeed by their extraordinary wariness and admirable judgment as to breeding-places in keeping their ground. For the erne has the expert eye of an engineer for an “inaccessible” spot, and having found one that nothing that moves on feet can reach, it returns to it year after year, and brings out its young in security. All that our poets have written of their eagles of fancy may, for majesty in flight, be fairly applied to this bird. “When the tempest’s at its loudest, on the gale the eagle rides,”—“playmate of the storm,”—“triumphant on the bosom of the storm, glances the fire-clad eagle’s wheeling form,”—“a swift eagle, in the morning glare, breasting the whirlwind with impetuous flight,”—all these are quite applicable to the sea-eagle, for folk say that no tempest that ever blew could keep the erne at home. When the sea-birds are driven inland, the ernes remain to wheel about as if enraptured in the storm-distracted sky—and “like spirits hardened by despair, joy in the savage tempest.”

There is nothing mean about it. A law to itself, and therefore lawless; stronger than any other fowl it ever sees, and therefore a tyrant; a bird of prey, and therefore pitiless. Its eyrie is a citadel that cannot be stormed, and the fierce-eyed robber, seated on its eminence, overlooks the townships of the gulls, and as it pleases takes manorial tithe of the fish plunder they bring up from the sea, and of their young,

Its cry is a cruel, clear-ringing bark, very characteristic of the fierce baron of the cliffs, and when circling in company a pair can be heard yelping to each other until eye and ear together fail to catch sight or sound of them. When they are young the sea eagles, as yet unconscious perhaps of their birthright of supremacy, roam about among the moors and valleys, finding their food where they can, killing weakly lambs, or joining the raven in an ignoble meal on carrion.

Sometimes, strange to say, this creature of vast spaces and dizzy heights will nest in trees or even among reeds upon the ground. But its characteristic haunts are the wildest and most rugged sea-cliffs, and its hunting-grounds the rocky islets or tall upstanding bluffs and “peopled rocks” upon which the sea-folk cluster in their colonies.

No one, however indifferent he may be to the ordinary sights and sounds of Nature, can maintain even the affectation of unconcern when visiting for the first time the

ledged and terraced rocks upon which the brave guillemots congregate. As the boat approaches the sea-girt nesting-home of these delightful birds, the cliff, looked at through glasses, seems garrisoned by a multitude of little soldiers in black and white. They are standing to attention, shoulder to shoulder, along every ledge, in level lines where continuous foothold permits it, in little knots on every broader plateau, while the summit is thronged. As the boat gets nearer you see that, besides the white-breasted birds standing upright, there are just as many showing their black backs sitting on the ground, or rather propped up on their tails.

The latter are sitting-birds, for the eggs are so large as compared with the mothers that they cannot be sate upon in the ordinary brooding manner of other fowls. So the guillemot, when she wishes to sit, walks up to her egg and then with her beak pushes it between her legs, and so straddling as it were over it, she remains always at an angle, her body resting against the egg, instead of nestling down upon it.

Long before the invaders’ boat comes into the shadow of the cliff, the birds take alarm at the visitation, and at first by dozens, then by hundreds, and finally by their thousands, spring upwards or dive downwards from their places, and fill the air with an indescribable murmur and flurry of wings—

But the brave guillemots do not scream or cry out. Some of them grunt their dissatisfaction at disturbance, and but for this they betray no symptoms of annoyance or anger. Nor do they circle round their threatened home, but rising from their places in a fast-thickening cloud, they scatter for a minute or two through the air, and then settle upon the sea and wait.

Nothing, surely, can be more beautiful than the sudden uprising of many birds, whether the scarlet battalions of flamingoes leaving in sumptuous tumult the Egyptian marshes; the gay parrot flights when changing feeding-grounds in the Australian bush, or this sight of our myriad guillemots as with one accord they fill the air with their white wings, and, beautifully stooping to the sea, spread themselves in a sheet of pied dots upon the green water. And as you land you feel that all those thousands of eager eyes are watching you, thousands of little hearts thumping with misgiving at your intrusion. And here and there one bird is sometimes seen still bravely “holding the fort,” not with any defiance, but a calm, good-soldierly courage that commands respect. And now and again a mother will return, too anxious about her egg to remember the risk to herself, or, remembering it, too anxious to care about the risk; she comes with hurrying wing, and, before the very eyes of the unmannerly trespasser, takes possession of her treasure, and tucking it in between her legs turns her back upon the company and trusts to Kismet for the result.

But those gaunt and grim-faced rocks, ribbed and wrinkled by the wear-and-tear of sea and weather, are only the nurseries of the guillemots, not their homes; for they live for nine months of the year upon the dancing sea, never coming back to the solid crags at all. Early in spring the first of them, the advanced couriers of the colony, reappear from the ocean, reconnoitring their egg-towers, and then they disappear again, as if to convey the news to the rest that the earth still stands where it did. And then about May the guillemots begin to come in earnest, and, astounding as the fact is, each bird actually seems to remember the very spot upon which it laid its eggs the year before, for we are told that the professional egg-hunters, who for a score of years or more have regularly rifled the sea-birds’ terraces, are accustomed to find, year after year, in particular places, eggs of a particular shape, or size, or colour. For there are few eggs, if any, that differ so boldly both in the ground colour

and the markings as the guillemot’s. Some have been taken spotless and colourless, like a heron’s; others altogether sienna, as the kestrel’s sometimes is; while between these two extremes of no-colour and all-colour stretches as infinite a variety of markings as on the pebbles on the shore. Perhaps the most beautiful of all are those where the ground is a clear, bright green-blue, and the spots—large and irregularly scattered, of a rich chocolate shading into brown-pink—make on it a strong, bold, well-defined pattern, without any of the intermediate specks and streaks and zigzags that are characteristic of this bird’s eggs. They are not laid in any nest, but on the bare flat rock, sometimes protected from the violence of the wind by lying in an indentation or where the rock is rough faced. But as a rule the guillemot does not seem to expect her egg to be blown off the spot where it is laid, and (though there are woful exceptions) she is right, for in due time a dusky fuzz-ball, with a noble appetite for little fishes, takes the place of each egg.

Then it is, alas for the poor parent guillemots! that the sea-eagle comes on its broad pinions, yelping, and, swift as the wind, swoops down, grazing the surface of the rock, and, regardless of the indignant mob that rises in protest, flaps off with careless wing back to the eyrie, where its eaglets are waiting for food. And every time the sea-eagle comes and goes there is one fuzz-ball less than there was.

But if tens are taken, thousands are left, and ere long the old birds, finding their young ones restless, and fearing,

perhaps, as they may well do, that a fierce gust may sweep them over the precipice on to ledges below, or that inexperience may tempt them too near the dangerous brink, take the little ones on their backs—so the climbers say—and fly down with them to the sea. Even if the chicks fall off in the course of the descent, it does them no harm to plunge into the water. It must astonish the youngsters to find themselves sousing into the sea, but the next instant they have discovered that all is right, and before their screaming mother has recovered from her concern at the accident, they are swimming about merrily and enjoying their first bath. And once in the ocean they remain there,

till the following May calls them back to the rocks and the cares and pleasures of domestic life.

Man is, of course, the chief enemy of these sea-bird colonies, for in the bleak and barren islands where they breed, human life could be scarcely supported if it were not for the annual harvests of eggs and young. The guillemots’ eggs are collected by tens of thousands. This work commences at Flamborough, for instance, in the middle of May. For the first nine days the climber has a good run of eggs; for the next nine, eggs are scarce. At the end of that time all the birds who had been first robbed have laid again, and he has a second run of large hauls, averaging from two to three hundred a day. Then comes a second “slack” of nine days, after which there is, as it were, the aftermath, sometimes hardly worth the trouble and danger of gathering, sometimes equal in value to the first harvest. The birds themselves, too, are eaten, more especially the puffin.

St. Kilda has been described as “the paradise of puffins: every available spot is burrowed and honeycombed with their holes, and the sea is often black with birds.” Hither in the nesting season come the islanders—men, women, and children—and with short rods, at the end of which are nooses of horsehair or string, drag the little “bougies,” as they call them, out of their burrows. The birds are plucked (the feathers being carefully put by for sale), cleaned, rubbed over with salt, and hung up in strings to the roofs of the cabins, where the peat-smoke partially “cures” them, and in this state they form one of the chief and choicest items of the St. Kildan’s austere fare. But altogether apart from its attractions at the “hardy Norseman’s” winter board, the puffin is a very charming little bird. Its very quaintness makes it engaging, for, whether you take it in profile, with its grotesque beak in completest evidence, or full-face, with its queer, owl-like look, its genuine unaffected comicality commends it to your amused and kindly regard. For it is a most amiable fowl. It never seems to quarrel with its kind, and even when it does the disagreement is rather the make-believe of clowns than in serious earnest. The puffin is almost voiceless, its usual sound being a purring noise, which, when it is submitted to the extreme indignity of handling, becomes a kind of half-hearted grumbling. No birds are more sociable than the “sea-parrots”: they are never seen alone, and even in their colonies they are not exclusive, admitting any other sea-fowl that likes to join them to equal rights of citizenship. But you must not put your fingers into its beak. Puffins are not called “parrots” for nothing.

When breeding commences, the islands or headlands that they frequent present scenes of most delightful activity.

Puffins are busy in all directions, digging out holes to lay their eggs in, or putting last year’s burrows into thorough repair. Both parents join in the work of excavation, taking turns, and while the one is employed the other either sits with a most absurd expression of pompous self-satisfaction, like a fat little owl-faced page, in close attendance, or flits about in idle amusement in company with vast numbers of the temporarily unemployed. Though so short-winged and plump-bodied, they fly with singular speed, and wheel and circle with great grace; but it is when they dive that they are at their best. Regardless of height, they plunge head-foremost from their cliffs into the sea, and, using their wings just as if they were still in the air, literally fly under the water. But they never stay away long, for all their thoughts are in those little burrows on the cliff, and the constant flying to and fro of the anxious pairs, their whirlings in the air before settling and after rising, keep the air alive with noisy wings, and fill the scene with bustle and happy animation.

So close sometimes are their nest-holes crowded that it is impossible to walk without putting the foot in them, and it even happens that these accommodating birds, when hard pressed for room, inhabit “semi-detached” holes, and live two families in one. But here too falls the shadow of the sea-eagle, and the poor parrots’ nurseries, when the young ones sit outside their burrows, innocent of danger, pay heavy tribute to the paramount lord of the northern sky. No erne’s nest is completely furnished unless it be strewn with puffins’ beaks.

Oddly enough, “the fierce sea-eagle” and the poor puffin find another connecting link, less strained than that of being the eater and the eaten, in the rabbit. The erne will often take up its quarters for a time near a warren, and the sea-parrots do the same; but their reasons are very different, for while the former goes among the coneys for its meals, the latter does so to borrow the use of their burrows. And they live together on apparent terms of amity, much as the burrowing-owl and the prairie-dog live together on the Texan wastes.

Nesting with them, in some of these haunts on the wild west coast of Scotland, is found the stormy-petrel, the tiny bird which sailors, in the old days of sailing-ships, held in such superstitious dread, and which are still called Mother Carey’s chickens. Who Mother Carey was Jack probably did not care, thinking only that she was a personage of very evil intentions towards ships and those “who go down to the sea” in them, and wishing, when he saw the little things running along the waves that held the ship in chase, that she had kept her chickens at home. But wiser bookmen tell us that the name comes from Mater Cara, quoting in proof of it, that the French call the petrels “les oiseaux de Notre Dame,” which may or may not be the explanation—most probably not. For in the same dull way they tell us that Davey Jones’ locker means the locker of the ghost of the prophet Jonas, because West Indian negroes happen to call a ghost “duffy!” All of which reads very much like nonsense, worse nonsense indeed than Jack’s own phrases—which, like all good fairy-tales, have most meaning when they have none at all.

However all this may be, the salts of the past thought the stormy-petrel a bird of ill-omen, and they were not far wrong, for when all the other birds, dreading the coming tempest, had left the ship, the chickens remained.

Being alone, they became conspicuous, and though they had been there all along, but unobserved when flying with larger birds, the sailors, noticing them for the first time, thought they had just arrived as heralds of the squall. For no weather, however bad, will drive the petrels to shelter, and so deft are they with wing and foot, that when the seas are driving “mast high” they may be seen paddling and skipping, on tip-toe as it were, over the green curves of the breakers, or running along them sheltered from the gale under their lee. And though it is no larger, this tiny scoffer of the hurricane, than a starling, it is curious to think how many hundreds of brave men have felt a sinking at the heart when they saw the black diminutive bird skimming the furious billows that pursued the vessel. Nowadays, going under steam instead of canvas, the seaman does not trouble

himself much about wind, and still less about the bird that our ancient mariners used to think brought it.

What a shock for the old salts, who dreaded the killing of a petrel, to hear that under the name “Blasquet chickens” they have been eaten on toast, like snipe, and declared to be “delicious eating.” Yet such is the fact; and seeing that the bird does not feed on fish, there is no reason why it should not, unlike most sea-fowl, be palatable.

For the food of petrels, strange to say, is oil. At any rate, nothing else is found in their stomachs, but where the oil comes from—whether they collect it from the surface of the sea, or whether by some chemical process of their own they convert other material into oil—no one can say with certainty.

Oddly enough, too, the little stormy-petrel in its breeding haunts does not fly by day, but feeds its young at night; and here, again, reason is puzzled for an explanation. They lay their eggs in crevices of the rocks, in heaps of dÉbris, or old rabbit-holes; but these are only to be found by searching, as there are no birds on the wing while the sun is shining, and they do not, like all others, betray their nurseries by going to and fro in the daylight with food. What strange contrasts! For more than nine months of the year the petrel is “the playmate of the storm”—

always in attendance upon the tempest, an omen of ship-wreck and sea-terror:

and then for the rest of the twelvemonth it lurks in little holes in rocks, under heaps of stones, in rabbit-burrows, coming out only when it is dark, a bat-like creature of dusty crevices and dusky twilight, mortally afraid apparently of everything that moves by day, and shunning on land the men whom at sea it seemed to triumph over and to doom.

And how terrible the declension from being “Mother Carey’s chickens,” mysteriously shaken out of the old dame’s lap in the sky to bring men to their death by drowning, to “Blasquet chickens,” picked out by ragged little islanders from the chinks in which they are hidden, and then eaten by tourists and townsfolk, fried upon toast!

Nor are these birds’ only enemies human ones, for in the predatory black-backed gulls they find untiring and cruel persecutors. As persistent and as cunning as crows, they loiter about the nesting-places of the smaller birds, searching out their eggs and young, and chasing the parents. Even large birds, like the cormorant, dare not leave their nests unprotected, as the air above is full of keen-eyed, black-backed gulls, and every eminence has its patient, sinister

watchman waiting for some incautious mother to leave her eggs exposed, and in a twinkling the thief pounces on it.

Their courage, too, is extraordinary. The nest that is shown in the illustration is not in any of the usual sites that this gull selects, and is chosen for that reason, as showing the fearlessness of these birds, for it is built in a sheep-walk which the woolly folk had frequently to traverse, and was found out by the shepherd seeing all his flock, as they passed in single file, jumping at the same spot. On going to find the reason for this agility, the hen-bird was discovered sitting on her eggs.

Of all the gulls, this is perhaps the least of a sea-bird. For it lives almost altogether on land, searching the beach and rocks for dead fish and other food cast up by the tide, and boldly coming inland to feed in ploughed lands, or follow the course of rivers, or pick up a living in harbours and docks, going back to the water to rest and sleep. Very different is the scene when the visitor, landing on one of their breeding-rocks or islands, disturbs the hosts of the lesser black-backed gulls, to that when he landed among the uncomplaining puffins. For the gulls resent the intrusion with wild cries and threats, and, instead of flying away, patiently disconsolate, to wait for the intruders’ departure, wheel and whirl overhead, with angry clamour and noisy wings, making believe to swoop down on the trespassers, and shouting at them to go away. And they have good reason for their indignation, for their visitors carry off their eggs by the boat-load for sale among the hard-living islanders.

But the black-back is a mischievous and predatory bird, doing infinite injury to more valuable species, like the eider-duck, whom it harries without remorse; and so one

can read of its eggs being cooked by the million without any keener feeling of regret than if they were apples. And, after all, the wholesale robbery of their nests does not reduce their myriads, for more than enough are hatched every year to fill the gaps caused by death. Being, too, so courageous, the gull escapes persecution by its larger companions, and even the sea-eagle prefers, with so large a choice of more timid victims, to leave such obstreperous birds alone. When threatened by the great bird of prey they join for the common defence, and the eagle is often seen, at long distances from the breeding-places, pursued by shouting gulls, and ignominiously mobbed out to sea.

With them, on these retaliatory sallies, goes that most intrepid of sea-fowl, the skua—one of the many birds that the sailor calls “molly-hawks,” and that the lesser creatures dread like a bird of prey. For such it really is, living chiefly upon the fish the other birds have caught, upon the birds themselves, and during the nesting season upon the eggs and young of all species indiscriminately: so reckless in attack that nothing on wings dares to oppose it, and so powerful that full-grown gulls, if they persist in the fight, succumb to it. He laughs the sea-eagle to scorn, challenging it by loud squalls to a duel. But the erne knows better than to join in a conflict from which neither honour nor profit can come, and spreading his great square-cut wings to the breeze, drifts swiftly away from the spot over the moorland that the skua calls its own. Where the herring-fishers are at work, there the skua is sure to be, gobbling as much as it can find for itself, and chasing all the other birds to make them drop their shares. Nor when there are eggs in its nest does the skua hesitate to threaten human beings that approach it, and indeed actually to attack them; while there are few dogs, if any, that have ever encountered an angry skua, and had experience of its sharp beak and battering wings, that care to face the fierce fowl a second time.