The Bird Watcher in the Shetlands, with Some Notes on Seals—and Digressions

Who would have thought that this same gull--the herring-gull--which kills and devours the young kittiwakes and puffins, besides living, habitually, on fish, crustaceans, mollusc...

In all the birds which I have enumerated as having a bright or pleasingly coloured mouth cavity, acquired, as I believe, through the agency of sexual selection, the sexes are al...

The ledges are thinning. There are only thirty-seven birds now where I counted more than a hundred the other day; but some may be coming back. My special young one is lying on t...

Once more in Eastcheap with Falstaff--and this I think will be the last time. I thought that by getting there before the first tide was down, I might see him come rolling up to...

Gone they are. The ledges are quite bare--not a bird to be seen there--nothing but the spray and the wild winds to love them now. It was what I had expected, had been sure of; b...

When I saw eider-ducks eating seaweed off the coast of my island I was aware that they were doing something which they had no business to be doing; for it is stated in works of...

On coming to the cliffs, to-day, I saw, lying on the rock in the little pool where I have watched the sea-leopard, as I call it, and that other which I have hitherto called the...

Seal-cove again to-day, and there, upon the same great slab, and at much the same time, five great seals are lying, whilst on other rocks there are six more. The tide is coming...

Another all-day sitting with the seals. From the edge of the cliffs in the morning, and in the same pool by which I had sat all yesterday, I saw a creature which I at first thou...

The wind last night was simply awful. Why it has no effect on the sea I cannot understand, for it is always calm now. No, there is little beauty in the sound of the wind here--n...

All doubt as to the real nature of these horrid feastings of the herring-gulls on floating carcases of kittiwakes is now at an end. I had been watching the seals in one pool, wh...

Would God my home were here, that I might make a lifelong and continuous study of the wild sea-bird life about me! What more should I want, then? except, indeed, a better climat...

Along the bolder coast-line of this island, where the cliffs, without being very high, are steep and frowning, there are some remarkable caves, which I to-day visited with Mr. H...

On this first day of August I was awakened early by something about the hut which I could not understand. It kept shaking, and there was a noise as of something in some kind of...

It was to-day that I saw that pursuit by an Arctic skua of a rock-pipit to which I have before alluded. It was over the heath, though near the cliffs. As to the rock-pipit never...

The young kittiwake differs in appearance from the parent birds in a quite uncommon manner, for, being prettily and saliently marked, it looks like a mature gull of another spec...

To all that I have said concerning the Arctic skua in my last chapter (I do not say it is much) I will now add what the Germans call a _Beitrag_, on the subject of the multitudi...

Visiting these islands in the late summer impresses me with a fact that it is easy to forget, viz. that even the most oceanic of sea-birds--the wandering albatross or stormy pet...

A man here--one accustomed to the sea, but not a Shetlander--had told me that seals come up on the rocks as the tide goes out, and are floated off them as it comes up again--and...

The red-throated diver moves softly upon the gentle play of the ripples, seeming, rather, to float with the tide than to swim, for there is no defined swimming action. When it t...

by the camp-fire at the end of it, it is like a strong wine that one has drunk. It is a mighty, stirring, active, compelling force--ending, however, in fever, which the animals...

My island again!--and all the birds still there, looking just as they did when I left it. More, too, have come. At night, but in a sort of murky daylight, I walk over the breedi...

To-day--which is my third here upon the island--I was actually assaulted by the terns. I saw a young one, now well advanced, that flew for a little and then went down on the gra...

I have just seen a sea-pie several times pull and tweak with his bill at the seaweed, apparently, till he secured something that had a white appearance. Holding this between the...

The young fulmar petrels here are still all in a state of fluff--not one true feather to be seen--just as I left them in the middle of July, on my last visit, though now it is t...

I have seen a fair number of eider-ducks within the last few days. All the grown ones are females--not a male to be seen now--and the greater number of them are unaccompanied by...

To-day I was to see the cormorants fly out from their caves, but my hopes were too high, and so proper for dashing. Having gone to bed at six, I awoke at ten, dozed till eleven,...

It is curious to see the guillemot-ledges so thronged now, when everything speaks of the departure of summer, if that, indeed, can be said to depart which has never, apparently,...

I have been watching the black guillemots. Like the common ones, they often carry a fish they have caught, for a very long time in the bill, before swallowing it, or even before...

To the one smooth beach that there is here come the terns, each year, to breed, and from these, as well as from the various gulls that nest upon the island, the lesser or Arctic...

It was terns, I think, who, when some killing Scotch naturalist or other had wounded one of their number, came down to it, pitifully, as it lay on the sea, and bore it away upon...

At last I have been able to extract a young puffin from an all-turf hole, which, by reason of its straightness, shortness and narrowness, seems to have been made by the parent b...

These views I would apply to every beast of prey in the Gardens, each one of which, in my opinion, has a gross wrong done it in not being allowed to do that which both its soul...

I had not before imagined that the puffin was one of those birds that suffered from the extortions of the Arctic or lesser skua, but I have found it out to-day without knowing w...

The eider-duck is here, but not its beauty, for at this fag-end of the summer and breeding season the males have all departed, and it is the sober-coloured female, either alone...

In the little black sentry-box where I pass the night there are two or three books belonging to its more permanent occupant. One of them is a British Bird book, and so last nigh...

That wren was an interlude, and the puffins another. When he of the bottle-nose returned, I at first used the shelter which I had constructed during his absence, but soon left i...

Oh, if there is really a metempsychosis, has not the soul of Bardolph gone into an oyster-catcher, or at least has not his nose, which was his soul--Shakespeare, at any rate, ha...