70 WILD BIRDS 



choicest. It has a bright yellow keel and white 

 standard and wings, and on these are painted a 

 tiny picture of waving purple seaweed. 



A GULL'S MAZY MOTION 



It was on the last of the seven or eight days 

 I spent watching the herring gulls and puffins on 

 their nest cliffs that the Cornish scene opened out 

 in its full glory. Thirty miles off, though it looked 

 no more than seven, Lundy rose sheer out of that 

 midsummer sea, the deepest blue, thick pigment-blue 

 sea one could imagine, a colour wholly different 

 from the mild azure of the sky. What struck me 

 most about this colour was its immense area of 

 sameness. From the strand just beneath me to 

 the hard-cut rim of the horizon, north and east and 

 west, the colour was absolutely the same no bands 

 of purple here or grey or green there, such as vary the 

 seascapes of the Solent and many of the bays and 

 inlets along the southern coast. 



In this great scene I found the lesser black-backed 

 gulls or saddlebacks, herring gulls, puffins, cormor- 

 ants, razorbills, guillemots and jackdaws busy with 

 their eggs or young. I was too late for buzzard, 

 raven, and peregrine which nest in the tremendous 

 slate rocks, almost black rocks, rising out of the 

 water that at the slightest breeze lashes and whitens 

 and raves. In half a mile of these cliffs five buzzards 

 nested a spring or two ago, and I saw two old nests, 

 I think, of the raven, one built on a shelf of rock in 

 a hollow of the sea wall, which scarcely a roped man, 



