152 THE BIRD WATCHER 
For all his hat trigks—and I have certainly felt 
mine move as he flicked it—this great skua seems to 
me a rather uninteresting bird, so far as he can be 
studied on land. MHis piracies, presumably, take 
place far out at sea, whilst jealousy to guard his 
young makes it impossible to watch him in his care 
and nurture of them. For the rest, he does nothing 
in particular, and he has no wild cry like that which 
rings out so beautifully to “the wild sky” from his 
smaller relative. In beauty of form and of colour, in 
grace and speed of flight, in the wild, inspiring music 
of its cry, in its sportings, its piracies, its pretty 
sociable ablutions, and in its attacks, too, wherein the 
boldness is equal and the poised sweeps more splendid 
and lovely, the lesser skua, say I, the Arctic skua— 
Stercorarius crepidatus—a bird that has only one thing 
prosaic about it, its prenomen of “ Richardson’s” 
namely, which is a thing it can’t help, it having been 
forced upon it by prosaic people. Oh, how all the 
poetry seems to go out of bird or beast when it 1s 
named in that Philistine fashion, brought into per- 
petual association with some man—some civilised 
man—appropriated to him, made the slave of the 
“Smith,” or the “Brown” or the ‘ Robinson” ! 
What a vulgar absurdity to make the name of a 
species a mere vehicle for the sordid commemoration 
of some one or other’s having been the first to see and 
slaughter it! What, when we think of any wild 
creature, do we care to know about that? What 
should its name call up before us but a picture of 
