174 THE BIRD WATCHER 
there. This certainlyooks like a partition of office 
as between the two parents, but it is hardly worth 
while saying so, for everything one says or thinks one 
hour or day is contradicted the next. There is little 
or no uniformity in the actions of birds. That is my 
constant experience. The other chick has been for 
long clasped under the parental (left) wing, but 
whether it has always been the same parent | cannot 
say, for there is nothing here to distinguish the two. 
Now, however, there is an interlude, both the parent 
and chick standing and preening themselves. The 
chick stands comparatively alone, with nothing be- 
tween him and the sea. Now he has disappeared, 
moving a little along the cliff’s edge, but soon I see 
him again, clasped tight beneath the wing of one or 
other parent, who sits close brooding on the rock. I 
think there has been a change of parents here, so here 
is the accustomed contradiction. 
Looking down through the glasses at the chick, it 
appears to me to be feathered, but to have, at least on 
the back, a close crop of down projecting above them. 
The beak is nothing like so long as the parents’, 
either actually or in proportion to the chick’s size, or 
the size of its head. The feet, however, are relatively 
quite as large, or even larger. The bird is getting on 
in size, and again I wonder why, if it is taken down 
on the parent’s back, this flight is so long delayed. It 
is difficult, indeed, when one sees the little wings 
flapped, to think that the chick can fly yet, in any 
proper sense of the word, but it does not seem to me 
