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THE CORMORANT. 
The Cormorant. 
The quantity of fish one of these birds will devour is 
astonishing — three or four pounds a day, or about half their 
weight, — a Cormorant weighing from six to seven pounds. 
What should we say of a man eating seventy or eighty 
pounds of beef or mutton at his daily meals P which he would 
do were his appetite as great in proportion as that of the 
Cormorant. The fact is, that, like most birds living on fish, 
its digestion is extremely rapid, and it therefore requires a 
proportionally larger supply of food, of which if it is deprived 
it soon dies, as is often known to he the case. Thus, on the 
western coast of the Hebrides, these poor birds suffer severely, 
when, during and after a continued gale, the Atlantic rolls in 
its enormous billows, dashing them against the headlands, 
and scouring with their fury the sounds and Creeks. As far 
as the eye can reach, the ocean boils and heaves, presenting 
one boundless field of foam, the spray from the summits of 
the waves sweeping along the waste like drifted snow : no 
sign of life is to be seen, save when a Gull, labouring hard 
to bear itself up against the blast, hovers overhead, or darts 
by like a meteor. If, at such a season, the haunts of the 
