SEA-FOWL SHOOTING IN THE FIRTH OF FORTH. 133 



less, perhaps, from the good supply of meat, drink, and to- 

 bacco. If I did catch Kelly casting a furtive glance now and 

 then at the streaky horizon, he seemed ashamed of himself ; 

 as for the old whaler, he regarded sea, sky, wind, everything 

 with utter contempt, except the provision-basket. 



In sailing over to the May, the boat might have been 

 freighted with the commoner kind of sea-birds, but we only 

 shot a few for the boatmen. A pair of solans crossed the 

 bow, when my son dropped both a right-and-left shot and 

 they were cleverly netted as the boat sailed past. A third 

 flew by the stern, which I killed, but being unwilling to lose 

 time by tacking, we left it on the waves.' We declined to 

 shoot again at these geese, which may almost be termed pri- 

 vate property. 



The breeze had freshened, and the waves were high enough 

 to make shooting difficult, and landsmen squeamish. The 

 boat was, however, abreast of the south-west corner of the 

 May, and we were about to hug the land in a search of the 

 western rocks for cormorants and the black guillemot. The 

 west wind, so friendly in the morning, was now a bitter foe, 

 for it drove the surf upon the rocks in great booming billows, 

 making it no easy task to discern the difference of sea-birds 

 at any distance, and next to impossible to force the cormo- 

 rants from the shelter of the caves. In a cavern less ex- 

 posed to the rolling swell, a pair of shags were perched on a 

 point of rock. The boatmen clapped their hands and shouted, 

 but both birds dropped into the terrific boiling caldron below. 

 They remained so long in this whirlpool that we fancied they 

 had escaped out to sea. At last they emerged and took post 

 on the same ledge. Kelly then threw a piece of wood at them. 

 One dived, but the other flew out, and was shot by my son. 

 As its neighbour did not show again in the cave, it no doubt 

 escaped into the sea by a long underwater swim. The cor- 

 morant we secured was a male, in the richest green, with a 

 spring tuft in perfection. 



