CHAPTER XXVI 



BIRD FISHERS OF THE SEA 



4 LMOST all sea birds are fishermen. There are, it 

 /\ is true, exceptions, such as the small and delicate 

 storm petrel which feeds on the minute animalculas of 

 the Atlantic and kindred oceans, and other members of the 

 petrel family, including the shearwaters, but these exceptions 

 are few and far between. On a fine summer's day — in the 

 Minch, perhaps, or in the Passage of Tiree — I have often 

 watched razorbills and guillemots moving singly or in strings 

 just above the water's surface, making for their distant fishing 

 grounds. The puffins I did not see so often — ■! think they 

 do not range so far in their feeding as do either of the birds 

 first mentioned — yet on the Hebridean Islands they nest in 

 enormous numbers. 



In their feeding the puffins seem to prefer sand eels. 

 At all events these form the staple food which they provide 

 for their young. At times Arctic skuas which nest on neigh- 

 bouring islands await the returning puffin a few hundred 

 yards out to sea. The skua is the arch-robber of the sea 

 birds' world, for he lives entirely on the fish that he forces 

 gulls, terns, and the like to disgorge as the result of his 

 fierce onslaughts. A puffin attacked in this way realizes that 

 escape through the air is impossible, for on the wing the 

 skua is by far the stwifter of the two, and so without hesitation 

 plunges into the sea, diving, or rather hurling itself, beneath 

 the Water with its catch of sand eels still grasped firmly in 

 its powerful parrot-like bill. 



Most comical of birds is the puffin — it always seems so full 



125 



