Page:Cassell's book of birds (IA cassellsbookofbi04breh).pdf/261

 the throat with the food that they have procured; each of them disgorges on the borders of the nest several dozens of small fishes, which are immediately appropriated by the hungry occupants. Many, however, fall upon the ground, and as no Cormorant thinks it worth while to pick them up, they are left to taint the atmosphere. Towards the end of June the young birds fly away, and the old ones begin to rear a second brood. The chase after Cormorants is a very favourite amusement with the zealous sportsman, although the birds when killed are of no use whatever. Their watchfulness and cunning when they are at large are calculated to test his utmost perseverance and caution. Near the trees where they build their nests, however, they are very much more easily destroyed, and still more readily in their eyries; their destruction, indeed, is so simple that it becomes almost a matter of necessity. But here the sport loses its charms, and the battues that are organised against them assume very much the appearance of a massacre; every one who can procure a gun hastens to the scene of action, and multitudes of the birds are annually slaughtered. In this country the flesh of the Cormorant is regarded as uneatable; the Laplanders, however, and also the Arabs, are of a very different opinion, and consider it, on account of its fatness, to be an especially dainty kind of food.

(Phalacrocorax carbo).