XLVII. 

 MORMON FRATERCULA. (temm.) 



Puffin, Tommy Noddy, or Norie, Sea Parrot, 

 Coulter Neb, &c. 



This very singular bird breeds on various parts of our 

 coasts, and in various situations. A few of them resort an- 

 nually to one of the Feme islands, on the Northumberland 

 coast, where they lay their eggs in some old rabbit burrows, 

 now thickly overgrown with rich grass. In the Shetland 

 islands, where they breed in immense multitudes, they have 

 in some places taken up their abode high above the ocean in 

 clefts, and crevices of the cliffs, or in horizontal holes in the 

 softer intervening strata, no doubt made by themselves, to the 

 formation of which their most curious and powerful bills seem 

 fully adequate ; in another place, where probably the clifTs do 

 not offer the same accommodation, they occupy a grassy slope 

 that occurs midway in the precipice, with fragments of which 

 (falling from above) it is strewed, and under and amongst 

 these they rear their young ones. 



They are here, in such numbers, that when viewed from 

 above at an elevation of three or four hundred feet, they have 

 the appearance of a swarm of bees, scarcely looking larger 

 than that insect, ; and, though in their hurried and unceasing 

 flight to and fro, they present to our sight all the same ap- 

 parent bustle and confusion, yet, like them, they are perform- 

 ing with admirable precision, and in beautiful order, that one 

 unchanging part allotted to them in the great chain of this 

 wonderful creation. 



The Puffin lays one egg, of a dirty white, mostly marked 

 with various tints of colour, but so very faint and indetermi- 

 nate as to appear as though they were seen through the shell, 

 and proceeded from the inside like those marks frequently 



