SEA-BIRD NUMBERS AND MAN 63 



betrays their density, and we believe with Salomonsen that their 

 actual numbers are greater. Nevertheless, some Briinnich's guillemot 

 loomeries are vast, and those at Bear Island, Jan Mayen and Spits- 

 bergen are not the only ones that are stupendous. The largest loomery 

 in the U.S.S.R. is probably that at Bezymiannaya Bay in Novaya 

 Zemlya, where S. K. Krasovskii (1937) has estimated that about 

 1,600,000 Briinnich's guillemots (birds, not pairs) nest. But Salomon- 

 sen (1944) has estimated that in 1936 over two million Briinnich's 

 guillemots (birds) bred at the rock Agparssuit (Cape Shackleton), 

 north of Upernavik in West Greenland. This was about half the 

 population of this species in Greenland. There are many other huge 

 bird rocks in Davis Strait and Baffin's Bay; in West Greenland several 

 on Disko Island, in Umanaq Fjord (notably Sagdleq, which may 

 have a million Briinnich's) and in the Upernavik district (notably 

 Qaerssorsuaq, or Sanderson's Hope, where the guillemot cliff is at 

 least three miles long and over three thousand feet high and has two 

 hundred thousand Briinnich's), and several in the Thule district in 

 the far north-west, notably Saunders and Hakluyt Islands, and Cape 

 York, which contains what is probably the largest little aukery in the 

 world;* nobody has been able to guess how many millions nest there. 

 Other huge bird-colonies in the western Arctic are to be found in 

 Ellesmere Island, North Devon Island, Bylot Island and Baffin Island. 

 Indeed, throughout the Arctic, where the naked rock escapes from the 

 clutch of ice, and precipices rear to the sky from shores, the kittiwakes 

 and dovekies, the puffins and guillemots, the fulmars, the glaucous 

 gulls and pale herring-gulls, make their nests, and operate from them 

 to the feeding grounds, to the leads in the ice, the convergences of tide 

 and current, the upwelling zones at glacier faces and by the side of 

 big icebergs. And below the cliff-ledges is the tell-tale of the bird 

 city, rich plants, sudden patches of green in the arctic drab, green 

 swards indeed, bright yellow-green grass ; the round leaves of scurvy- 

 grass, lush, six times as high as in the barren places, which means six 

 inches high. On the slopes of scree and talus and broken rocks below 

 is a special mat of little flowering plants, benefiting from the bird- 

 dung leached and washed down from above; perhaps not the purple 

 opposite-leaved saxifrage, which shuns this community (it is too rich 

 for it), but alpine foxtail, the arctic poppy, the arctic buttercups, and 



♦Rivalled by those of Scoresby Sound and the Liverpool Coast in East Greenland, 

 whose little auk population (A. Pedersen, 1930) has been estimated at about five 

 million birds. 



