1907-1908.] The Bird Life of an Outei' Island. 1 3 



ing repeatedly with the most appealing anxiety. And the 

 youngsters evidently understood, for they were responding 

 with shrill pipings, and rushing hither and thither about the 

 edge of their ledge with their little wings outstretched in a 

 terrible state of excitement; their fathers and mothers were 

 calling to them to come down to the sea — and they feared to 

 make the plunge. Again and again I saw an eager chick 

 pause on the brink and hesitate, then, in a moment of im- 

 petuosity, he lost his balance and, turning a dozen somersaults, 

 reached the sea, where he dived immediately and was taken 

 charge of by an old Guillemot ; whether it was his real parent 

 or not I cannot assert, but I saw certain old birds, who already 

 had a chick beside them, leave it to accost and take charge of 

 others, who were bobbing about uncertain of their exact where- 

 abouts, and the whole business seemed sometimes rather con- 

 fusing to a human, although it was probably quite straight 

 and intelligible to a Guillemot. One after another, chicks 

 went down to the sea, some, as I have described, by accident, 

 others by a courageous launch out into space ; and again on 

 the next day and the next, we saw the same process going on, 

 and soon all round the island Guillemots swam with their 

 young, and the strange solicitous cry, which the Guillemot 

 keeps solely for its dealings with its young, was borne from 

 the bay to where we sat in our hut on the eastern side of the 

 island, and where previously sounds of the great bird colony 

 rarely reached us. 



Perhaps the crowning touch to this great bird colony was 

 given by the single pair of Peregrine Falcons which inhabited 

 the island, and we look back on the day we located the eyrie 

 as the red-letter one of our 1905 visit. I remember the day 

 well, — a day of heat, broiling and breathless ; " all airs were 

 dead," with the Atlantic seeming possessed of scarce energy 

 to foam along the island's bulwarks, and a cloudless vault 

 stretching out in an arch of the deepest blue to meet the haze 

 of the wide horizon. We progressed along the cliff edge 

 slowly — it was such a delight to sit in the cool moist depths 

 of the gorges, to commune with Eazorbills and Guillemots, 

 and hold intimate intercourse with Shags ! — and it was late 

 in the afternoon when we came out on the summit of a big 

 headland which protruded into the ocean and towered out of 



