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 CHAPTER II

SPOILER AND SPOILED

O the one smooth beach that there is here come the terns, each year, to breed, and from these, as well as from the various gulls that nest upon the island, the lesser or Arctic skua—whom some call Richardson's, as though it belonged to that gentleman—is accustomed to take toll. Sweeping the sea with the glasses, one detects, here and there upon its surface, a dusky but elegantly shaped bird, that sometimes rises from the water and descends upon it again, slowly and gracefully, but is never seen to poise and hawk at fish, like the terns themselves, or, more rarely, some of the gulls. These are those skuas who elect to take their chances at sea, and whenever a tern rises after making his plunge, with a fish in his bill, they rise also and pursue him. Then may be witnessed a long and interesting chase, in the course of which the two birds will sometimes mount up to a considerable height, rising alternately, one above the other, as though each were ascending an aerial ladder. There are no gyrations in these ascents. They are, or at least they have the appearance of being, almost perpendicular, so that they differ altogether from those of the heron and hawk, once familiar in falconry, and of which Scott has given us 9