SEA FOWL. 223 



that of diminishing national supplies of food by pillaging 

 the herring sboals and schools of edible fish. It must be 

 remembered, however, that gulls, at all events, are no divers, 

 and the herring usually lie a fathom or so under the surface. 

 A kittiwake, or " cobb," has to take what he can glean 

 on the surface ; he will swoop round and round a turn or 

 two in the sky and drop down with astonishing precision 

 and exactness on anything he cares to pick up, but he does 

 not go under, and rides in the hollows of the waves as lightly 

 as a cork. His food is flotsam and jetsam the off- washings 

 of the shore and all the disjecta of the sea bottoms, the soft 

 shelled crabs that come to the top, the sickly or wounded 

 fish, and occasionally some of the small fry the observant 

 boatman will have noticed basking in the tepid water 

 shining under a summer sun, or flashing into the air and 

 daylight as some " ravening salt sea shark," some great 

 bass or whiting of the weedy ledges, runs amuck through 

 their close-packed columns and drives them up. Indeed, 

 in helping themselves to the young of these same whiting, 

 the teeming " haddies " of the Scotch estuaries, the gulls do 

 immense service, for big fish are to little fish far worse foes 

 than anything wearing feathers. 



The Yorkshire cragsmen who live amongst the cliffs 

 all the time the birds are breeding and have daily experience 

 of their housekeeping arrangements, describe the fish remains 

 littering the cliff-shelves as chiefly those of "base" fish, 

 sand eels, gobbies, wrasse, and the like. Herrings, of course, 

 in any condition were absent. " Those persons who write so 

 glibly on the subject of the destruction of fish by sea birds," 

 writes the Rev. F. 0. Morris to the Yorkshire Gazette, "forget 

 that long before guns were invented the birds must have 

 had it all their own way on the cliffs of our coast all round 

 these islands ; and how was it then they did not exterminate 

 the fish in ages long ago, instead of their increasing in the 

 way they have done ? " According to the Rev. Barnes 

 Lawrence, it is " not so much a question of how much the 



