Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/226

216 egg. The nearest young fellow nimbly slips into the nest, and keeps the egg suitably warm till the mother returns. Shall he not also have a little satisfaction when others are sipping the joys of life in full draughts? There are no orphans among the auks. If a pair happen to die, the young fellows will hatch the egg out, or, if the chick is already hatched, they will take care of it. The early instruction of the chick is a matter of patience, time, and trouble. As soon as it is dry, the parents take it to a cliff by the sea-shore and spring down, while the young one remains standing above and not knowing what to do in his helpless condition. The old ones call, but he does not follow, for he is afraid of the leap and of the strange element. Father and mother repeat the leap again and again, and encourage the timid one. The young bird follows at last, not venturing upon the leap, but in a kind of desperate mood letting himself fall. As soon as he has touched the swinging wave he feels at home, and begins to swim bravely, the parents keeping by him, so as to give him rest on their backs when he is tired.

A quite different spectacle is presented by those mountains which are principally inhabited by a particular species of gull. To observe one of them I made a special excursion into Lapland. I had at the time a design of writing a book on the life of birds, and had read in some work about three-toed gulls that nested in the bird-mountains in such multitudes "that they darkened the sun when they rose, completely covered the mountain when they sat down upon it, deafened the ears when they screeched, and turned the verdure-clad rocks white where they were sitting." There are only three such mountains known—one in Lapland, one in Iceland, and one in Greenland. The one in Lapland, which is much the most remarkable, lies out of the course of the steamer, and we were therefore obliged to charter a special boat to reach it. A storm compelled us to go into a harbor of refuge. When the tempest had abated, about midnight, we continued our voyage. The waves were still high, and single gulls shot before and around us like dazzling white flashes. All at once, at Cape Svaerholm, not far from the North Strait, there rose before us a great black cliff. It looked like a large marble table covered with millions of little white points that shone like stars. We fired a shot at them, when, as soon as the report had ceased, these became living birds, pure white gulls, and sunk in a few minutes hastily down to the sea in so compact a throng that I might have thought a snow-storm had broken loose and was pouring its immense flakes down from the sky. For a few minutes it snowed birds as far as one could see. The surge rolled wild, but it was the euphonious accompaniment of the rustling of the wings and of the shrieks of the frightened sea-birds. As far as the eye could reach the waves were covered with the foam-born children of the sea, and the cliff and the mountain were as white-dotted as before. Yet these were only the males, which had rushed away on the approach of danger.