182 MUTTON BIRDS 



on tlieir fellow-Shags; and it must not be 

 thought that these comparisons are merely 

 fanciful. Expression of the emotions in birds 

 is as distinct, and interpretable, to those who 

 have Avatched, as is the expression of his 

 emotions in man's best friend, his dog. Man, 

 dog, or bird, each has been digged from the same 

 pit, moulded from the same clay. Although 

 developed on divergent lines, each has been 

 modelled on a common jilan, and there still 

 exists, diluted to tenuity and strained through 

 time incalculable, an essential sympathy. The 

 pain and pleasure of the Beasts of the Field and 

 the Fowls of the Air, can never appeal in a 

 foreign tongue to man. His frame is theirs and 

 it is by this corporeal kinship, that he can read 

 expression as well as comprehend emotion. 



The nests on the southern edge of the breeding 

 grounds are never, I believe, finished. In this 

 "No Man's Land," no pair of Shags can com- 

 plete their work. Here stand the ruins of scores 

 of half, and quarter built nests, their walls 

 broken and eroded with continuous skirmishes, 

 scufflings, and chasings. From the pillars 

 rather more advanced, the seaweed lining is 

 pilfered as soon as spread. On the untidy floor, 

 dusty with trampling and gritt}^ with guano, 

 sand, and fragments of fish bone, eggs are 

 scattered everywhere. Any real knowledge of 

 the building habits of these Stewart Island 

 Shags cannot of course be gathered in a day, 

 but I tliink that birds relegated to this Alsatia 

 must be breeding for the fii'st time. Thieving, 

 though general throughout the colony, does not 

 els(»where culminate in comnmnal ruin. Even, 

 however, in the better ordered portion of the 



