SEA-BIRD NUMBERS AND MAN 95 



The egg of the razorbill, writes MacKenzie, "when fresh is con- 

 sidered very good eating, but the bird even when in condition only 

 fairly so." The razorbill was not important in St. Kilda fowling. 

 Most of its colonies were fairly accessible to the St. Kildans, but they 

 took little of them, save a few basketfuls of eggs a year. Adults were 

 usually stripped of their feathers, and their plucked bodies put to the 

 fields as manure. 



The guillemot is much more important. MacKenzie writes "I 

 have seen seventeen baskets full of eggs taken at one time from Stack- 

 biorrach [Stac Biorach, a slender pillar 236 feet high out of the sea 

 between Hirta and Soay], and at another time in the same season 

 fourteen. These baskets hold each about four hundred of these eggs. ... * 

 These eggs are very good eating when fresh. After they are incubated 

 for a few days most of the egg appears, when boiled, to be changed 

 into a rich thick cream, and in this condition they are also relished. 

 Sometimes eggs, not only of this species but of some others which have 

 not been hatched, are found late in the season. Some of these when 

 cooked look like a piece of sponge cake, have a high gamey flavour, 

 and are esteemed a great delicacy. Others are as bad as the most 

 vivid imagination can depict." The adults were not thought good to 

 eat except when they came in to the rocks, fat, in March and April, 

 when they were caught by an imaginative device, described later 

 (P- 97) > they were mostly used as a source of feathers and fertilizer. 

 Many blown eggs were sold to tourists. 



More puffins were killed on St. Kilda than any other species of 

 bird. While the St. Kildans' opinion* of its eggs may have been 

 doubtful, or not unanimous, there was no doubt about their attitude 

 to the adult. "The puffin," says John MacGillivray (1842), who visited 

 St. Kilda in 1840, "forms the chief article of food with the St. Kildans 

 during the summer months, and is usually cooked by roasting among 

 the ashes." It was also the primary source of feathers; its feathers 

 commanded a higher price from the laird's factor than those of the 

 fulmar. Often the puffins were captured by women; Sands (1878) 

 describes how on 15 July 1875 a number of young women were left 

 on Soay for three weeks purely to catch puffins for feathers; on 

 16 July seven more were left on Boreray for the same purpose. Sands 

 also calculated that at least 89,600 puffins were killed in 1876. Connell 

 (1887), on his visit in 1886, may be recording a change of human habit 



♦These figures are borne out by later accounts, though Dixon's suggestion "the 

 natives gather the eggs literally by boatloads" is an exaggeration. 



