WOUNDED CORVORANT. 47 



After having satisfied our curiosity here, we returned to 

 our boat, and crossing Alum Bay we again passed through 

 the Needles, and pulled in for the beach at Sun Corner, 

 where the corvorants had fallen. Three were quite dead, 

 the fourth had got into the water and was swimming about 

 in style. We chased him more than an hour, firing at 

 him about forty times, but to no purpose, as he dived the 

 instant the trigger was pulled : at last we very reluctantly 

 gave up the pursuit as hopeless, the wind having fresh- 

 ened, and made the swell rather too heavy for an open 

 boat ; the tide, too, was quite out, and the rocky bottom 

 occasionally peeped up all round us in the hollows of the 

 sea, looking very black and disagreeable. Two of us took 

 a spell at the oar, by turns, with the fishermen, and worked 

 away like Britons, till a noble swell laid us high and dry 

 on the shingles at Freshwater. 



The following day was spent in a repetition of the cruise 

 under the cliff, with pretty much the same success ; and 

 the next morning we started on foot for the southerly point 

 of the island. The wind had been sinking during the 

 whole of the previous day and night, and what air now 



me that for fourteen years successively he had robbed these birds of their young. 

 He had never known more than one pair to frequent that neighbourhood ; yet 

 though robbed every year, they have never left it. They build no nest, but de- 

 posit their eggs, four at most, on a ledge of the cliff, always the most inacces- 

 sible ; never however a second time on the same spot, but seldom more than a 

 hundred yards from the spot selected by them on the preceding year. The young 

 are hatched about the first week in May, and the parent birds make ample pro- 

 vision for their wants. From ten to twenty yards from the eyrie is found a store 

 well supplied, consisting usually of puffins, young jackdaws their 'daintiest 

 bits ' according to Jackman, and kestrels ; of which latter birds, surprising as it 

 appears, Jackman assured me he has found greater numbers than of any other 

 bird, except the puffin." Rev. C. A. Bury, in the ZoologutJ i. 517. E. N 



