g6 SEA-BIRDS 



when he states that "in an overwhelming majority of cases the puffin 

 is killed for its feathers, and the carcass is simply thrown away, 

 going usually to enrich the soil." Certainly when Steele Elliott (1895) 

 visited St. Kilda in 1894 the 4,800 lbs. of feathers produced a year 

 were largely composed of those of puffins, and may have been derived 

 from about 90,000 birds; Sands's estimate of 1876 may have been no 

 exaggeration. However, by 1898 and 1899 (Heathcote, 1900) nothing 

 like 90,000 were being killed, though some thousands were taken 

 every year. Feathers had decreased in value. "The St. Kildans eat 

 puffins when they cannot get fulmars," Heathcote wrote. By 1902 

 feather-taking was finished, and puffins were taken for food only. 

 Wiglesworth (1903) said that the discontinuance of feather-taking 

 has "caused the birds to multiply to such an inordinate extent, that 

 they are doing serious damage to the pasturage by riddling the hill- 

 sides with their burrows." This may have been somewhat of an 

 exaggeration; the good grazing-ground of St. Kilda has not been 

 burrowed into yet by a single puffin. The puffin was still being captured 

 for food in 191 o and 191 1 (Clarke, 1912b), and probably continued 

 to be so, for this purpose only, until the evacuation. Certainly the men 

 were out killing puffins on 22 April 1927, the day after J. Mathieson 

 (1927) had arrived. 



The methods of fowling on St. Kilda were straightforward enough, 

 though one or two of their inventions were ingenious. Manx shear- 

 waters were hunted at night, among the boulders of the Carn Mor 

 and other places; as they landed on the ground and shuffled into 

 their burrows they were easy to take with lights. Puffin-nesting was 

 largely women's work. Dogs helped them find occupied nests under 

 the turf and boulders of the six great puffinries of St. Kilda (the north 

 face of Conachair, the north slopes of Dun, Carn Mor, the sides of 



*The St. Kildans appear to have disagreed with the rest of us about the taste of 

 the egg of the puffin. Although the puffin is by far the most abundant bird on St. 

 Kilda (MacKenzie, who was not prone to exaggerate, said "I estimate that there 

 cannot be fewer of them than three millions" — and from Fisher's own experience 

 of the St. Kilda puffin population he is sure he was right), its eggs were not sought 

 like those of the other auks, guillemot and razorbill; yet sought they were, as 

 MacKenzie records, and Connell, Murray and Wiglesworth after him. It is probable 

 that puffin eggs were not collected assiduously because they were usually too deep 

 in burrows; some recorders, like Dixon and Sands, who took evident pride in the 

 completeness of their accounts, do not mention their taking, though they mention 

 the taking of most other eggs ; it seems likely that the puffin egg was near the limit 

 of tolerance of even the St. Kildan palate. That this palate was different from ours 

 is clear; tradition and practice had evidently made it so: but even St. Kildans 

 refused to eat the eggs (or the flesh) of the shag, or the flesh of the oystercatcher. 



