BIRDS OF THE WAVE AND WOODLAND 185 



sea-fowl, the skua — one of the many birds that the 

 sailor calls " molly-hawks," and that the lesser creatures 

 dread like a bird of prey. For such it really is, 

 living chiefly upon the fish the other birds have 

 caught, upon the birds themselves, and during the nesting- 

 season upon the eggs and young of all species indis- 

 criminately : so reckless in attack that nothing on wings 

 dares to oppose it, and so powerful that full-grown gulls, if 

 they persist in the fight, succumb to it. He laughs the 

 sea-eagle to scorn, challenging it by loud squalls to a duel. 

 But the erne knows better than to join in a conflict from which 

 neither honour nor profit can come, and spreading his great 

 square-cut wings to the breeze, drifts swiftly away from the 

 spot over the moorland that the skua calls its own. Where 

 the herring-fishers are at work, there the skua is sure to be, 

 ofobblinor as much as it can find for itself, and chasing all 

 the other birds to make them drop their shares. Nor when 

 there are ee^s in its nest does the skua hesitate to threaten 

 human beings that approach it, and indeed actually to attack 

 them ; while there are few dogs, if any, that have ever 

 encountered an angry skua, and had experience of its sharp 

 beak and battering wings, that care to face the fierce fowl a 

 second time. 



2 A 



