44 WATER-BIRDS IN THEIR HOMES. 



boats, with red, tanned sails, making ready at sunrise for a 

 day's fishing. A fair day is a day of gladness in that region ; 

 air and sea are full of life. 



At dawn the cormorants set out on heavy wings for their 

 fishing grounds, flapping laboriously and stretching out their 

 long necks against the flush of morning red, as black them- 

 selves as midnight spectres. To Gaspe Bay and Baie Chaleurs 

 they go a-fishing, and with them go the white gannets from 

 Bonaventure. There is a turmoil of gulls clamoring and bark- 

 ing, and the shrill screams of restless terns, ever noisy and sus- 

 picious, keeping up an incessant alarm or -complaint. 



On the water about the bases of the crags little guillemots 

 bob like corks, diving and fishing, and a solitary loon comes up 

 to shout a prolonged halloo to some invisible mate ; or a big 

 seal lifts above the water like a mermaid, and, tossing a fish in 

 air, catches it as it descends head foremost and swallows it 

 with a groan. 



All day long the gulls wheel and scream about the Great 

 Arch Rock, the cormorants crane their long black necks over 

 the beetling walls, and gannets plunge about it ; but in gen- 

 eral both cormorants and gannets prefer to go farther for their 

 fishing, to the shoal water of the bays, where the tremendous 

 tides sweep great schools of fishes this way and that. 



Neither of these birds ever tires of fishing or can ever be 

 satisfied with eating. They will eat till the tails of the little 

 fishes stick out of the corners of their mouths before they will 

 stop. There is a record of a cormorant* which was seen to catch 

 and eat one hundred and eighty fishes in one and a half hours, 

 or two fish a minute. All fish-eating birds have these insatia- 

 ble appetites, and the amount they consume is beyond compu- 

 tation, though it should be said that they do not much disturb 

 the species most prized by man. 



