Page:Bird Haunts and Nature Memories - Thomas Coward (Warne, 1922).pdf/28

8 is more fanciful and less correct; he repeats some stories about the bird ﬁghting with and overcoming the raven, a table told by Stanley in his "Book of Birds." According to Evans, "the fierceness of the parent is incredible; no bird nor beast will venture to attack them; sometimes the sea-raven will dare to be so rash, but generally he forfeits his life for his temerity. The parent catches him under the throat with her beak and darts her claws into his breast; the raven, wounded, screams most dismally for quarter, but the offended bird is deaf to the entreaty and makes directly for her proper element, the ocean, where the raven is quickly drowned, and the puffin returns in triumph to the nest." Oh, Mr. Evans, and you a parson! Ravens have bred on Puffin, and a pair still nests in the neighbourhood; I have often seen the fine birds passing the island; they have not all been drowned! But the ferocious puffin has foes, very dangerous ones, nesting near by, for there are, as a rule, a fair number of disembowelled puffin corpses on the grass; the lesser black-backed gull could explain, no doubt, and, if not, we can guess that a pair of great black-backs, visitors if not occasional residents, know something about the slaughter. One day, in the nest of a lesser black-backed gull, we found one egg exact in size and markings to that of the larger species, but no great black-back was about, and it may have been an abnormal egg.

On the ledges of the steep cliffs guillemots sit solemnly on their single eggs; it is amusing to watch them alight, somewhat clumsily on the narrow ledge, whir their short wings for a second or two until they adjust the balance of their upright body, then poke the big green or white mottled egg between their legs. Razor-bills crouch in cracks, and do not sit upright like the guillemots; and in one place in particular a fair-sized colony of kittiwakes is established. These dainty and small gulls, delicate