50 ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
dawn on any reef where fish are plentiful, and you’ll feel the whole 
air astir with dim white wings. Look up above the Bird Rocks in clear 
weather, and you’ll see the myriads of gannets, each the size of an eagle, 
actually greying the sky with their white bodies and black-tipped wings. 
Or watch the gulls wherever they congregate—the big Blackbacks, with 
their stentorian “Ha! hah!”, the Glaucus, the vociferous herring gulls, 
and the little Kittiwakes, calling out their name persistently, “keet- 
a-wake, keet-a-wake.” Their voices are not musical—no seabirds’ 
voices are—though they sound very appealing notes to anyone who 
loves the sea. But all the winged beauty that poets and painters 
have ever dreamt of is in their flight. Lateen sails on Mediterranean 
blue are the most beautiful of sea forms made by man. But what is 
the finest felueca compared with a seagull alighting on the water with 
its wings a-peak? And what are seagulls on the water to those circling 
overhead, when you can lie on the top of an island crag looking up at 
them, and they are the only things afloat between you and the infinite 
deep of Heaven? 
Nearer down in my sanctuary there would be plenty of terns or 
sea-swallows, with their keen bills poised like alance inrest. They are 
perpetually on the alert, these light cavalry of the seagull army; and 
very smart they look, with their black caps, pearl-grey jackets and 
white bodies, set off by red bills and feet. They become lancer and 
lance in one, when they suddenly fold their sweeping wings close in 
to their bodies and make their darting dive into the water, which spurts 
up in a jet and falls back with a “plop” as they pierce it. Just skim- 
ming the surface are the noisy, sooty, gluttonous, quarrelsome shear- 
waters, or “haglets,” who have got so much into the habit of making 
three flaps to clear the crest of a wave, and then a glide to cross the 
trough, that they keep up this sort of a hop-skip-and-a-jump even 
when the sea is as smooth as a mill pond I would throw them a 
bucketful of chopped liver and watch the fun, camera in hand. Actu- 
ally on the water are long lines of ducks. My sanctuary would be full 
of them. From a canoe I have seen them in the distance stretching 
out for a mile, like a long, low reef. From the top of a big cliff I have 
seen them look like an immense strip of carpet, undulated by a draft, 
as they rose and fell on the waves. And when they took flight in their 
thousands, their pattering feet and the drumming whir of their wings 
were like hail on the grass and thunder beyond the hills. As you 
paddle alongside a crannied cliff you wonder where all the kittens 
come from, for the rocks are fairly sibilant with their mewings. These 
are the young Black Guillemots, or sea-pigeons, whose busy parents 
are flying about, showing a winking flash of white on their shoulders 
and carrying their bright carmine feet like a stern light. I would 
