BIRD LIFE ON THE SALTEES AND THE KERAGHS. 91 
moments, with their pretty wings uplifted and heads crossed, 
first on one side and then on the other, until the new comer at 
length delivers up his prey to his mate. At the end of May, 
before an egg is laid in their colony, the Kittiwakes pass their 
day standing or working on the incompleted foundations of 
their nests; but on the 8th and 9th June, 1883, I took twenty 
clutches, in most of which incubation had commenced. This 
was the case with most of the Kittiwakes’ eggs I took on the 
Bull Rock off Dursey Head, West Cork, on the 9th June, 1884, 
so that Kittiwakes appear to lay during the first and second 
weeks in June in the South of Ireland. I have never seen 
more than two eggs in a nest of this species, though three 
have been taken in a few cases on the Saltees. 
While gazing into a bay margined with the singular cliffs 
of clay one may see a dark form in some recess far down, 
which proves to be a Shag or Green Cormorant, its sable 
plumage contrasting with the dove-like Kittiwakes. A more 
attentive scrutiny reveals several other Shags nesting in 
deeper cavities in the clay, some of them side by side. 
Further south, where the rocks rise beneath the cap of clay, 
we find séveral dens in the face of the latter looking out to 
sea, each tenanted by a hatching Shag or family of downy 
young ones, miniature Cormorants, which cry out in great 
excitement at our approach, but when first hatched the naked 
little lump of black flesh with its snaky neck and blind head 
tumbling about is hideous in the extreme. 
On exploring the rocks which at one point are heaped on one 
another in tumbled masses, a Shag’s nest may be found between 
two blocks open to the sky, or in a hollow beneath a huge mass 
of stone that rests on points of rock. The parent birds do not 
fly out to sea, but sit eyeing us from a rock a stone’s-throw 
nearer the sea. I once approached a Shag that sat on a ledge 
outside the entrance of her den. She evidently thought to 
scare me away, for she continued to croak and snap her bill at 
me, writhing her snaky neck until I almost touched her with the 
pole I held. But Shags do not always breed in dens. At the 
south end of the island, where the cliffs are high and sur- 
mounted by very steep hill slopes, I descended to some secluded 
ledges, where I found several Shag’s nests quite open to the sky. 
Ihave found young Shags on the Saltees on the 1]th May, but 
