Page:Tourist's Maritime Provinces.djvu/350

292 privateering ancestor vouchsafed to climb the almost vertical sides and destroy the marauders. Protests from the townsfolk spared the birds, for which all lovers of wild life will be grateful. One has only to observe the feathered colony through a telescope to refute the thread-bare fiction that the gulls and the cormorants inhabit separate ends of the rock and make war upon intruders from either band. In the meadow of tall herbage the slender sea-crows and grey herring-gulls mingle with indifference, maintaining their households, preening their coats, stalking awkwardly about their common domain, trying their wings at the edge of the cliff, chattering with such vehemence that the clamour sounds all day in the ears of the village. The gulls lay their eggs on the ground, their black neighbours build upright nests of twigs. The cormorant weighs about seven pounds, being larger and longer bodied than a wild goose. In England and also in China this diver is bred and trained to fetch fish for its owner, as spaniels retrieve birds. At the British Court there used to be an officer who bore the title. Master of the Cormorants. The gulls and the gannets fly in groups of five to fifteen, keeping always above the sea but as close to shore as possible when foraging. The cormorants fly singly. All the bird dwellers leave Percé Rock in the winter but in the spring come winging back to make their home on this chosen pinnacle.