282 BLACK GUILLEMOT 
best acquainted I am inclined to believe that it is rather more 
than less numerous as compared with twenty years ago, 
On the west there are some four or five nesting localities, 
some of them very near together; and small parties inhabit, 
or recently inhabited, at least two spots on the east. Mr. 
W. 8. Baily observed birds in the Calf Sound, on. whose 
shore none have been found breeding, and it is quite likely 
that some small colonies have been overlooked, as the birds 
keep very close to their stations, and often swim right under 
the steep rocks. They mix little with other sea-birds, and do 
not place their nests amid the great congregations of allied 
species which are to be found in the same neighbourhoods. 
Their haunts are often cavernous places in a broken coast. 
The largest settlement, which numbers some twenty pairs, 
is in holes under the top of a low but steep cliff, with deep 
water beneath it. Here the eggs are laid in holes and 
crevices in the loosened rock. One or two pairs nest 
almost on the top of the cliff, some sixty feet above the 
sea, in holes in the grassy cap; one of these, which is 
tenanted yearly, has two entrances, and may originally 
have been made by a rabbit. A few pairs nest rather 
away from the main colony, round a rocky head, in crevices 
below the overhanging edge at the top of a steeply sloping 
bed of rock, 
A little further on is a very small group, located on 
either side of a cavernous gully, in holes and crevices of 
the hard rock. 
In another case the birds nest among the fallen boulders 
of a recess at the foot of a precipice, only some few yards 
above high tide, and almost inaccessible from the land. 
This is probably a new colony.’ In another locality I have 
seen a nesting hole low down on the cliff at the seaward 
end of a long gully, the entrance very open to view and not 
1 Details about these stations mainly from Mr, Graves. 
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