1 8 The Bird Life of an Outer Island, [Sess. 



brother, to destroy a suspicion of C.'s that the Puffin burrows 

 might be older than the Falcon's tenancy and now disused, 

 brought forth from one of them an egg that was a Peregrine's, 

 we had difficulty in quelling our feelings. To any man 

 nurtured on the Nature literature of the day it would, of 

 course, have been as plain as a pikestaff : some intrepid, noble- 

 minded Puffin — can you imagine a Puffin with a noble mind ? 

 — had avenged the blood of his race by kidnapping an egg — 

 a potential murderer — from the Falcon's stronghold and stored 

 it up in his burrow. Unhappily this theory did not satisfy 

 us — you may put it down to our training ; it occurred before 

 the days of a Nature press — we thought there was one less 

 bloodthirsty. The colour of the egg suggested it. It had 

 evidently been of that light yellowish-brown variety which 

 occasionally occurs in Peregrine clutches, although now it was 

 considerably discoloured by contact with the damp earth, and 

 the last egg of this variety which we had seen — it had been 

 in a mainland eyrie — had proved to be an unfertile one. 

 Might it not, we thought, have also been the unfertile egg 

 here, and rolled out of the eyrie by one or other of the Pere- 

 grines when its true value was discovered ? The only thing 

 against this theory was the relation of the burrow to the eyrie 

 ledge. Judging by the eye, it seemed the most unlikely thing 

 in the world that an egg leaving the eyrie with an ordinary 

 amount of impetus would ever reach the particular burrow 

 where it was found ; but as I refused to allow C. to experi- 

 ment with a Puffin's ^gg which he had specially borrowed for 

 the purpose from another burrow, we had to leave the problem 

 unsolved. In the end we carried it away as a memento, and 

 as we have no egg collection in which it can get lost, so it 

 remains to this day. But in truth the discovery of that 

 eyrie was an episode in bird - nesting which required no 

 memento ; it belongs to the unforgettable. There had been 

 Peregrines' eyries before, there have been Peregrines' eyries 

 since, — that Atlantic eyrie has a place of its own in our 

 memories which will not be easily effaced. Can a man say 

 more than that he would fain live it — and indeed all these 

 island days — again ? 



[This paper, as delivered to the Society, was given along 



