Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/473

Rh lesser black-backed. (See Fig. 4.) The European oyster-catcher is also found breeding on this island, a species closely resembling our own American form. An interesting photograph of the former, and the three beautiful eggs it lays among the stones and pebbles on the beach, is shown in Fig. 1 and 2. A large colony of the common gull were breeding in the near neighborhood. The inhabitants of this island of Rott belong to an ignorant class of coast people, who make profit on anything that mammal, bird or fish may bring them, subsisting themselves on the same products. They kill and eat both the cormorants and the gulls, and have a habit when the birds are first hatched of clipping the outer feathers of the wings, and consequently the birds are never able to fly. Then after they are full grown they



are easily caught and killed in numbers, being immediately salted down for winter food. With respect to the cormorants, the young are decapitated in their nests, as soon as they are old enough, and put to similar uses. Nowhere else in all Norway does this custom prevail. When Professor Collett visited this island of Rott, he ascertained that the inhabitants did not use the razorbill auks for food, and that these birds were marvelously tame, so much so that when he undertook to photograph them, one of the legs of his tripod was in touch with the tail of one of the birds in the immediate foreground when he secured the picture reproduced in Fig. 3. He was also in plain view at the time.

Another interesting picture of an auk (Alca torda) is shown in Fig. 5. This was secured at Vardö, in northern Norway. From this