BIRD PHOTOGRAPHY IN NORWAY 



469 



lesser black-backed. (See Fig. 4.) The European oyster-catcher is 

 also found breeding on this island, a species closely resembling our own 

 American form. An interesting photograph of the former, and the 

 three beautiful eggs it lays among the stones and pebbles on the beach, 

 is shown in Fig. 1 and 2. A large colony of the common gull 

 were breeding in the near neighborhood. The inhabitants of this 

 island of Eott belong to an ignorant class of coast people, who make 

 profit on anything that mammal, bird or fish may bring them, subsist- 

 ing themselves on the same products. They kill and eat both the 

 cormorants and the gulls, and have a habit when the birds are first 

 hatched of clipping the outer feathers of the wings, and consequently 

 the birds are never able to fly. Then after they are full grown they 



Fig. 6. Eider Ducks. (Bratvar.) 



are easily caught and killed in numbers, being immediately salted down 

 for winter food. With respect to the cormorants, the young are de- 

 capitated in their nests, as soon as they are old enough, and put to 

 similar uses. Nowhere else in all Norway does this custom prevail. 

 When Professor Collett visited this island of Eott, he ascertained that 

 the inhabitants did not use the razorbill auks for food, and that these 

 birds were marvelously tame, so much so that when he undertook to 

 photograph them, one of the legs of his tripod was in touch with the 

 tail of one of the birds in the immediate foreground when he secured 

 the picture reproduced in Fig. 3. He was also in plain view at the 

 time. 



Another interesting picture of an auk (Alca tor da) is shown in 

 Fig. 5. This was secured at Vardo, in northern Norway. From this 



