Bird Watching

by Edmund Selous

Watching Shags and Guillemots

I have referred once or twice before to the cormorant (including under this title the shag), and once to the guillemot. In this chapter I shall treat of both these birds a little more at large, for in the first place they are salient amongst sea fowl, giving a distinctive character to the wild places that they haunt, and secondly, I have watched them closely and patiently. Both are interesting, and the cormorant especially has a winning and amiable character, which I shall the more enjoy bringing before the public because I think that up to the present scant justice has been done to it. Something, perhaps, of the wild and fierce attaches to the popular idea of this bird, due, no doubt, both to its appearance, which has in it something dark and evil-looking, and to the stern, wild scenery of rock and sea with which this is in consonance, and by which it is emphasised. Perhaps the mere name even, which has by no means a harmless sound, has something to do with it.

"As with its wings aslant

Sails the fierce cormorant

Seeking some rocky haunt,"

says Longfellow—lines which, to me at least, call up a graphic picture of the bird, though I do not know that the first contains anything which is specially characteristic of it; and Milton has recorded—as we may, perhaps, assume—the way in which its uncouth shape appealed to him by making it that which his grand angel-devil chooses, on one occasion, to assume. On another one, it may be remembered, Satan takes for his purposes the form of a toad, and on each, no doubt, the poet, who never appears to yield to the strong temptation (as one would imagine) of loving his great creation, has intended to convey a general idea of fitness and symbolical similarity as between the disguised being and the disguise taken.

It has been conjectured that the habit which the cormorant has of standing for a length of time with its wings spread out and loosely drooping, suggested to Milton its appropriateness, and certainly there is an o'er-brooding, possession-taking appearance in this attitude of the bird, in keeping with the ideas which may be supposed to reign in Satan's breast as he looks down from the high tree of life upon the garden of Eden and its two newly created inhabitants. Independently of this, however, the bird, as it stands in its ordinary posture, firmly poised, the body not quite upright but inclined somewhat forward, with the curved neck and strong hooked beak thrown into bold relief—the dark webbed feet grasping firmly on the rock—has in it something suggestive both of power and evil, which may well have struck Milton, as it must, I think, anyone who is appreciative and either not an ornithologist or who, if he is one, will suppress for the time being his special scientific knowledge and se laisser prendre aux choses, as did the less (falsely) critical portion of Moliere's audiences.

For, whatever the cormorant may look, he is in reality—except from the fish's point of view, which is, no doubt, a strong one—both a very innocent and, as I have said, a very amiable bird. He shines particularly in scenes of quiet domestic happiness—in the home circle both giving and receiving affection—and it is in this light that the following pictures will for the most part reveal him. I must premise that they all refer to that smaller and handsomer species of our two cormorants adorned with a crest, and whose plumage is all of a deep glossy, glancing green, called the shag. If I speak of him sometimes by his family name, it is because he has a clear right to it, and also because it has a more pleasing sound than the one which distinguishes him specifically. The habits of the two birds are almost the same, if not quite identical. They fish together in the sea, stand together on the rocks, and in the earlier stages of its plumage the more ornate one closely resembles the other in its permanent dress. One might think that they were not merely the co-descendants of a common and now extinct ancestor, but the modified form and its actual living progenitor. But I am aware of the arguments which could be used against such a conclusion.

I will now give my observations as taken down at the time, and should they be thought minute to the point of tediousness, I can only in extenuation plead the title of this book, whilst assuring the reader, that however it may lie between us two, the bird, at any rate, is in no way to blame.