LONDON BIRDS 53 



the calls of her nature. But, having been taken from 

 the nest in infancy, and cut off ever since from female 

 society of her kind, she had to find out for herself by 

 slow processes of experiment many things which, under 

 happier circumstances, she would without effort on her 

 part have been taught by example. A single egg was 

 laid, and hatched off in May. The nest had not 

 been empty many days before the parent birds began 

 extensive repairs and alterations, and when at last 

 Parliament rose and members and others whose move- 

 ments are dependent on theirs escaped to fresher air, 

 the Cormorant was ' left sitting ' on her heap of white- 

 washed sticks, her mate usually beside her, with tail 

 cocked to the angle of a saucepan handle, in the 

 ungraceful attitude peculiar to birds of her kind on 

 the nest. 



Another single bird a second brood was hatched 

 in the last week of August, unfortunately to live only 

 eight or ten days ; and in the following October the bird 

 was, for the third time in the season, again sitting, this 

 time on a nest trimmed and enlarged with fronds of 

 sedge and sticks to something like the height and 

 symmetry of the seaweed columns of the Cormorant 

 colony on the Megstone Rock, where the sitting bird 

 first saw the light. 



The lesson of the second disappointment the egg 

 was addled was not lost, and, before the next spring, 

 the Cormorant had realised that there is a more con- 

 venient manner of hatching a family of three than by 

 as many successive separate sittings. 



