MR. J. H. GURNEY ON BIRDS OF THE PEMBROKESHIRE ISLANDS. 629 
our object was the birds, and we had no time to examine into 
its strata. 
The Puffins are the great sight on Skomer, and, indeed, their 
numbers and quaintness and the military uprightness with which 
they sit, or rather stand in rows, is extraordinary. Puffins are 
more numerous here than in any other Welsh island, and as 
numerous as at the Saltees on the coast of Wexford. It will be 
within the mark to say there are 7,000 Puffins on Skomer island, 
and 3,000 more on Grassholm ; but any attempt at counting is 
futile, neither could it be done by counting the holes with which 
Skomer is riddled because a good many are tenanted by Shear- 
waters and Rabbits. 
A portion of Skomer island is covered with bracken, but it is in 
the bare places carpeted with turf and the Sea Pink that most of 
the birds’ holes are, and here the keeper’s dog proved very useful 
in sniffing them out. In these places a good deal of fighting goes 
on under ground, and strange growlings may be heard proceeding 
from the interior of their burrows, which are so near the surface 
that the foot involuntarily slips through the crust into them. 
The Puffin’s powerful bill must always make him master, and 
accordingly the keeper accuses Puffins of dispossessing Rabbits of 
their holes, and even of killing many young ones, but I think 
he exonerates the more peaceful Shearwaters. As for the Shear- 
waters they might as well not be on Skomer at all, for all a visitor 
knows of them in daytime, though, as a matter of fact, there lie 
asleep beneath him many hundreds of these birds. A good many 
Skomer Shearwaters on first arrival are unintentionally caught in 
rabbit traps, and I am afraid the keeper is more annoyed by the 
springing of his traps than by the destruction of the birds, as the 
Rabbits represent money and the Shearwaters do not. 
A good account of Skomer, from a Naturalist’s point of view, is 
that contributed some years ago to ‘The Zoologist’ (1884 p. 433) by 
the Rev. M. A. Mathew, who spent a night on the island with 
Mr. Propert, of St. David’s, in order to hear the nocturnal wailing 
of the Shearwaters. Another narrative of a visit to the island is 
from the pen of Mr. Prane in the Transactions of the Cardiff 
Naturalists’ Society, 1895-6, p. 61. Mr. Prane found some crania 
on the island which he considered were the skulls of the Greater 
