296 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



photographs. The flat table-like tops of the Pinnacles were 

 crowded with dense masses of Guillemots ; every coign of 

 vantage and narrow ledge of the dark basalt cliff was also thickly 

 tenanted with a motley crowd of Razorbills, Puffins, Guillemots, 

 and Kittiwakes — thousands on thousands also on the water, 

 indifferent to our presence, scarce caring to scuttle lazily on one 

 side, or suddenly dive, before the boat is on them. Amongst the 

 Guillemots were many of the variety known as the Ringed or 

 Silver-eyed, having a white ring round the eye and a more or less 

 developed pure white streak running backward from it down the 

 side of the head. We have frequently seen them on the Speeton 

 and Bempton cliffs on the Yorkshire coast, but here they are 

 certainly more plentiful than at the southern nesting-place. A 

 very interesting bird was a Green Cormorant, or Shag, standing 

 upright and very conspicuous on a projecting ridge off Staple 

 Island. Unlike the common species, this is strictly marine in 

 haunts and habits ; the creature must be seen at close quarters 

 to note the extreme loveliness of its plumage, dark green glossed 

 with golden-brown and purple reflections— its beak gold and 

 irides emerald, crowned, too, in the spring with a noble crest 

 which curves forward, but now, in June, this distinguishing 

 feature is lost. As we near the Longstone, hundreds of Terns 

 — the Arctic, Sandwich, and Common Terns — pass and repass 

 the boat, and the air is full of the coarse grating call of the 

 larger and the soft " kree-kree-kree " of the smaller species; 

 hundreds are beating for food in the narrows and straits between 

 the rocks and islands. There is a constant flicker of white wings, 

 a constant interchange of places, as if following the meanderings 

 of an aerial dance ; now one and another dip lightly to the water, 

 but what they pick up we cannot make out. In singular contrast 

 to these light " butterflies of the sea" are those heavy Gannets — 

 wanderers from the Bass Rock ; they, too, keep constantly 

 crossing and recrossing each other's courses, but at a higher 

 level than the Terns — creamy white relieved by black-tipped 

 wings ; in flight most buoyant, now with slow and frequent flaps 

 of their great wings, then soaring and wheeling with no apparent 

 movement of these, till perceiving grey forms of their prey near 

 the surface and within striking distance, they descend almost 

 perpendicularly with nearly closed wings, like huge white bolts 

 shot out of the blue, throwing up a sparkling column as they 



