WOUNDED CORVORANT. 
47 
After having satisfied our curiosity here, we returned to 
oui' boat, and crossing Alum Bay we again passed through 
the Needles, and pulled in for the beach at Sun Corner, 
where the corvorants had fallen. Three were quite dead, 
the fourth had got into the water and was swimming about 
in style. We chased him more than an hour, firing at 
him about forty times, but to no purpose, as he dived the 
instant the trigger was pulled : at last we very reluctantly 
gave up the pursuit as hopeless, the wind having fresh- 
ened, and made the swell rather too heavy for an open 
boat ; the tide, too, was quite out, and the rocky bottom 
occasionally peeped up all round us in the hollows of the 
sea, looking very black and disagreeable. Two of us took 
a spell at the oar, by turns, with the fishermen, and worked 
away like Britons, till a noble swell laid us high and dry 
on the shingles at Freshwater. 
The following day was spent in a repetition of the cruise 
under the cliff, with pretty much the same success ; and 
the next morning we started on foot for the southerly point 
of the island. The wind had been sinking during the 
whole of the previous day and night, and what air now 
me that for fourteen years successively he had robbed these birds of their young. 
He had never known more than one pair to frequent that neighbourhood ; yet 
though robbed every year, they have never left it. They build no nest, but de- 
posit their eggs, four at most, on a ledge of the cliff, always the most inacces- 
sible ; never however a second time on the same spot, but seldom more than a 
hundred yards from the spot selected by them on the preceding year. The young- 
are hatched about the first week in May, and the parent birds make ample pro- 
vision for their wants. From ten to twenty yards from the eyrie is found a store 
well supplied, consisting usually of puffins, young jackdaws — their 'daintiest 
bits' according to Jackman, and kestrels ; of which latter birds, surprising as it 
appears, Jackman assured me he has found greater numbers than of any other 
bird, except the puffin." — Rev. C. A. Burt/, in the ' Zoologist,' i. 517. — E. N 
