100 SEA-BIRDS 



much more advanced than that of St. Kilda. The St. Kildans could 

 not read> far less write, and as a result what we know of the size of their 

 crops of various species of birds and their eggs comes largely from the 

 miscellaneous writings of a few resident ministers and chance visitors, 

 from whose accounts the picture has to be fitted together like a jig-saw 

 puzzle, of which some pieces have been irrevocably lost. But in the 

 Faeroes and Iceland, at least during the nineteenth and twentieth 

 centuries, wild-fowl figures have been kept; and though no doubt 

 at times and places the inhabitants have given way to various tempta- 

 tions, here to exaggerate and there understate their catches, the 

 figures published by F. Salomonsen (1935J for the Faeroes and the 

 government publication Hagskyrslur Islands for Iceland seem to be 

 reasonably accurate. 



In the Faeroes the most important sea-fowl is the puffin, of which 

 half a million are killed in the islands in a good year. Some fowlers 

 working with the jieyg have killed 900 birds in a day, and 200-300 

 per man is quite usual. Williamson, whose important book shows a 

 very proper attitude towards food, describes the cooking and eating 

 of lundi, and from our own experience in Iceland and elsewhere we 

 echo his views as to the excellence of the puffin as food, especially 

 when braised in thick gravy and eaten with boiled potatoes sweetened 

 with sugar in the northern style, and jam sauce. The Faeroe men 

 also kill a large number of guillemots, certainly over 60,000 and 

 probably over 100,000 a year, and many razorbills. They also take 

 a vast number of guillemots' eggs — some hundreds of thousands — 

 though they do not take eggs on a large scale from other species. 

 The birds are salted in brine for the winter and the eggs preserved 

 in water-glass. The Faeroe men also snare auks on the sea by noose- 

 rafts (p. 98) and collect young auks on the sea below their cliffs 

 before they grow their primaries and can properly fly. 



Since the psittacosis outbreak in the Faeroes young fulmars have 

 been forbidden as an article of food, but before 1936 at least 80,000 

 young were taken below the cliffs in early September, and some adults 

 were taken as well. There is only one gannetry in the Faeroes, on the 

 Holm of Mykines, and here between 400 and 900 young are usually 

 taken every year, representing approximately half the output of young 

 gannets of the colony. Throughout the literature of fowling it seems to 

 be clear that a traditional established colony of sea-birds can suffer 

 cropping of up to half its annual output of young at the hands of the 

 local fowlers. 



