NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY OF GLASGOW. 271 



Cormorant, Phalacrocorax carlo (L.) 



The nearest island to the mainland is the home of the 

 Cormorants. Their old island * was further away, and near the 

 Gulls, but these predaceous neighbours stole their eggs, and drove 

 them all away. The boatman told me that, as soon as the old 

 Cormorants were put up, the Gulls would be down on the eggs, 

 and he has known a complete clearance of them to be made by 

 these robbers in a few minutes, and in spite of his presence. 

 Where we put the Cormorants off on my last visit, there was one 

 Gull who was evidently on the look-out, and in an instant 

 was sailing above the nests. Though our boat was within a 

 few strokes of the rock, I gave up all hope, and the men were 

 certain, if there was an egg, the Gull would have it first ; but for 

 once they were wrong, for, as it happened, there were two eggs, 

 and we bagged them both under the very nose of the robber- 

 Gull. It was decidedly early, April 5th, but Cormorants are the 

 first fowl to lay. Nothing else had come to the rocks so early. 

 The next to begin are the Gulls, probably. Guillemots, Eider 

 Ducks, and Terns, are very late breeders. It needs not the nose 

 of a pointer to discover the whereabouts of a Cormorant's nest. 

 I have come across some of the worst odours that the nose 

 of man can conceive in my rambles, but never, in England or 

 Africa, did I smell anything so foetid as a Cormorant's nest. 

 Well might Milton call them the representatives of the 

 fiend of darkness, though he drew the simile from their 

 gaunt black forms. I do not know how long incubation 

 lasts, but it must be a long time, for Mr E. Smith, who 

 was at the same place nearly two months after me, does not 

 mention that any of the eggs were hatched. (ZooL, ss. 49, 

 34). The nests were only six inches high on my visit, 

 and built for the most part of seaweed; but in one I 

 found a piece of rope, and in others large pieces of wood, 

 apparently fragments of wreckage. Cormorants have, like so 

 many other birds, the power of throwing up the indigestible 

 parts of their food in pellets. Two, which we picked up on 

 landing, were friable, and of a very pink colour. They were 

 composed of crabs. My boatman said their eggs would never 



* Alluded to by Hewitson (" Eggs of British Birds," ii., p. 471), 



