

^ 





A GROUP Ol' PLKFINS. 



A SEA-BIRD NURSERY 



Some interesting facts en the domestic life of Sea-birds 



By A. J. R. ROBERTS, B.A. 



Illustrated with Photographs by the Author 



FAR back in the ages when the earth 

 was void, and without form, the 

 elemental wind swept over the 

 heaving waste of waters, stirring them to 

 their depths. On every wave there rode 

 a crest of gleaming white, and the wind 

 caught them up, tossed them hither and 

 thither and breathed life into them. 

 For the sea had responded to the touch 

 of her rude lover, and the children of 

 that embrace were the sea-fowl — wild, 

 restless and elemental as the forces which 

 begat them. I:5orn of the sea, to be the 

 playthings of the wind, they partake in 

 greater or lesser degree of the nature of 

 one or the other parent. Some, long 

 and lever-winged, light as ff)am and 

 strong as the storm, have made their 

 home in the air, wheeling, soaring, gliding 



96 ; 



and wheeling again hour after hour, 

 day after day, living, feeding, and, who 

 shall say, perhaps sleeping, on the wing. 

 Others, boat-like in build, with breast- 

 bone thickened to form a keel and wings 

 short and narrow to serve as paddles under 

 water, spend their life on the ocean follow- 

 ing the wandering shoals of fish far out 

 of sight of land and out-matching them 

 in their own element. 



Such are the sea-birtls for nine months 

 in the year, but they cannot quite dis- 

 pense with land. Regularly as the seasons, 

 the instinct stirs within them to propagate 

 their own species, and in obeiliencc to 

 the call they journey humlreds of miles 

 unerringly across the trackless ocean, 

 guided liy some unknown compass back 

 t(j the nurserv where thev. too, were born. 



