THE SEA BIRD AS AN INDIVIDUAL: RESULTS OF 

 RINGING EXPERIMENTS ^ 



By R. M. LocKijrr 

 Skokholm Island, PemlyrokesMre 



We are accustomed to think of the sea bird plurally. We think and 

 speak of a crowd of sea birds, or a flock of sea birds, or a host, a raft, 

 a bunch, and so on through the list of appropriate or inappropriate 

 nouns of assemblage. This use of vague and general terms is forced 

 on us by the habits of sea birds, the majority of which spend half 

 their lives, the winter half, on the sea at a distance from us, and the 

 other half of their lives, the summer half, on lonely shores and re- 

 mote islands not commonly visited by man. For this reason man has 

 not been able to give much consideration to the idea of the sea bird as 

 an individual. Nor is it easy to see how we may make close enough 

 contact with the gull, the auk, and the petrel at sea to recognize and 

 study individuals. It remains for us to study them in their terrestrial 

 summer homes, and there they are generally packed together so 

 closely, nesting in scores, hundreds, and even thousands, that at first 

 glance we are quite bewildered by this apparently promiscuous com- 

 munal home life, and we may wonder if they have individual exist- 

 ences at all. 



I happen to have lived long enough on an otherwise deserted island 

 to have been able to penetrate beneath this first impression. I now no 

 longer think of sea birds vaguely, collectively. You have only to men- 

 tion gannets, shearwaters, puffins, razorbills, or storm petrels, and I 

 am immediately remembering certain individuals of these species 

 with whom I am acquainted, and wondering how they are faring at 

 sea at this moment and whether they will turn up for inspection on 

 the island next spring. Such an individual, for instance, as the Manx 

 shearwater that flew home from Venice, or the razorbill inhabiting 

 a certain crevice on the island year after year. 



But I must not anticipate. Skokholm Island lies a few miles off 

 the coast of Pembrokeshire. It is rock-bound, about 240 acres in ex- 

 tent, and has only two houses on it, a lighthouse at the most westerly 



* Address given at the Weekly Evening Meeting, Royal Institution of Great Britain, 

 Friday, November 18, 1938. Reprinted by permission from Proceedings of the Royal 

 Institution, vol. 30, pt. 3, 1938. 



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