THREE MURDERERS
G
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; but again I felt bitter disappointment. It is more than disappointment—a sadness and emptiness of heart at finding these accustomed tenants, that have for days given life and beauty and domestic happiness to the desolate frowning precipice, gone, and their known places void. How I miss them! I retract now what I said before about wild creatures giving no relief to the sense of solitude. These guillemots did, I believe, and I feel lonelier now without them. And so, whilst I lay warm under the bedclothes, were you, you little mite of a guillemot—but stay, I have apostrophised you once already, and am not going to do it again.
There was rain, mist, and wind extraordinary to-day, but the sea dashed finely over the rocks. The pool, though a haven, was often seething, yet I saw Bottle-nose, and, later, a common seal, in it. The latter was the only one I watched. He came up at intervals of a few minutes only, and, as on former occasions, always rose perpendicularly in the water, with his nose pointed to the sky. In this position he remained all the while he was up—which was never more than a minute—and then sank without altering it, differing in this last respect from the two larger seals, which always went down with a porpoise-like roll. His eyes were shut all the while, even when he went down, but still I supposed that, once beneath the surface, he was accustomed to swim away and enter upon some active employment "under the glassy, cool, translucent wave": the line, indeed—which, by the way, with its exquisite context, is not to be found in that overpraised pert piece of ex cathedra dictation, The Golden Treasury—for the gold non olet, but out on its many omissions and at least one vile, prudish mutilation!—hardly suits such a pot-boil as this haven now is; but it is always untroubled in the deeps. But I was deceived in this supposition, for once he came sufficiently near to the great bulk of rock where I was lying for me to see him for some time before he rose; and, to my surprise, I saw that he was floating in just the same attitude, and just as quiescently. As he came up his eyes were fast closed, so that I think he must have been dozing, or sleeping, like this, under the water, all the while, yet rising—perhaps automatically—at the requisite intervals. The common seal, if it be not as nocturnal as the cat tribe, from which it may have descended, is certainly a very great sleeper.
The eye of the puffin is, by virtue of its setting, almost as marked a feature as the beak itself. First it is surrounded by a ring of naked skin, much resembling the feet in colour—of an orange-red, that is to say—and just within this ring there is a dot at one point of the iris, and a straight line at the other, both of which are really of a bluish or slaty hue, but have the appearance of being black. This line and dot form the base and apex respectively of a sort of little triangle, the sides of which are formed by a deep depression in the skin, and within it the eye is framed like a little miniature, and, as is sometimes the case with pictures, partly encroached upon by the frame, so that its circular shape is interfered with. The effect of the whole—for all these details blend together, and can only be distinguished with the glasses—is that the bird seems to have a triangular eye, and this bizarre appearance is heightened by another, and much deeper, line, or fold, in the feathers, which runs back from the base of the triangle till it meets, or tries to meet, the black feathers of the head and neck, in a little delta between the two. Hardly less wonderful than the eye are the cheeks—if one may call them so—those two sharply defined oval surfaces of light, shining grey, so smooth and polished that they do not suggest feathers at all, but look much more like little veneered panels of fancy woodwork, let into a framework of ebony. To all this the beak has been added, to give full and crowning effect to the idea that governed at the puffin's making, which was that it should be "as remarkable a figure of a bird as any in our country," or elsewhere.
I have sometimes wondered if the fish which the puffin catches so deftly, and then carries home, a dozen at a time, are paralysed at the sight of it. If a shoal of sand-eels fainted, and lay strewed about the bottom of the sea, it would then be easy for their enemy to pick them up one after the other, pack them securely, and get a firm grip on all of them before they began to revive and wriggle. At least, it ought to be easier; but how the bird chases and catches each in succession, without losing those it has already caught, and which lie in a row across its beak, it is not so easy to see. I have sometimes, I believe, made out a dozen, at the least—all sand-eels—closely wedged together along the cleft of the mandibles, their heads and tails hanging down on either side of the lower one. Perhaps, however, the difficulty is not so great as it seems to be—of understanding it, of course, I mean; it is no doubt easy enough for the bird to do. My theory, at any rate, of its modus operandi is this. The first sand-eel is, no doubt, passed to the base of the mandibles, and being firmly wedged against the membrane that unites them, I suppose that they are finally closed upon it. Were they opened again, at all widely, to catch the next and subsequent ones, there would be a danger of as many as were already there either escaping by their own efforts, or being floated out owing to the pressure of the water. But the beak of the puffin, though broad and leaf-like in its shape, is sharply tipped, and by opening it but a little, and pressing the fish against the bottom, the bird could no doubt pinch up the skin so as to get a secure hold of it. The various little tactile movements of the mandibles upon the fish, by which the latter would be first grasped between, and then passed carefully down them, to lie against the one last caught, can be pretty well imagined, and they could be very effectively aided by the rubbing or pressing of it, on either side, against the sand, rocks, stones, etc., of the bottom. It must be remembered, too, that the mandibles open like a scissors, so as to be wider apart at the tips than at the base, which would diminish the difficulty; and moreover, each fish is so deeply indented by the sharp, cutting blades—which, however, do not seem to pierce the skin—that, although alive—reflecting possibly on the beauty of maternal affection—they would be likely to "cleave to their mould" like putty, for a little while after the pressure were relaxed.
I think that the broad, blade-like bill of the puffin has to do with this power that the bird possesses of holding many fish at a time, and that the razorbill, whose beak is of the same type, and who bites the fish across in just the same way, is in the habit of doing so also. Be this as it may, the guillemot, whose bill is quite differently shaped, holds the fish, as a rule, in a different manner, longitudinally, namely, with the head towards the throat, and the tail drooping over to one side. This is not invariable; but I have never myself seen a bird bring in more than one fish at a time. It is the same, I think, with the black guillemot, at least in this latter respect, but I have seen much less of it than the other. Unless, however, it be supposed more difficult to catch and hold many fish than many insects, there is no reason why the puffin should be singled out for wonder in this respect. The water wagtail, when feeding its young, fills its bill with insects, which it catches, not only on the ground, but flying also—a great feat, surely—and the lesser spotted woodpecker brings a similar assortment to the nesting-tree. I believe myself that most insect-eating birds do the same whilst feeding their family, unless when they catch an insect sufficiently large to be a host in itself.
What a whirr of pinions, and fine wild chase beneath the beetling precipice, and out to sea! It was the Arctic skua, pursuing, this time, a black guillemot, no doubt en route for its young. They went so fast—the skua with the swoop of a peregrine falcon—that I could only just follow the smaller bird, but I caught its white wing-patches, so am sure it was not a puffin. Half-way out of the cove the guillemot must have dropped its fish, for its pursuer descended, and hung hovering over the water, seemingly embarrassed, and without alighting upon it. This, at first sight, seems evidence in favour of the theory that the skua, unless it succeeds in catching the spoil before it touches the sea, will have nothing to do with it; but as a herring-gull now flew up, and behaved in the same way, the more legitimate inference is that both birds were looking for what neither of them could see, and that the fish, being alive, as it probably would be, had, by a remarkable conjunction of two lucky accidents, escaped. But, on the other hand, would the herring-gull have dared to interfere with the skua?—which it would have been doing, were the latter in the habit of picking up the fish from the water. On other occasions I have seen the skua fly off as soon as he had missed his swoop, and I have once seen a herring-gull following the chase, with a view, as seemed obvious, to such a contingency. This happened on the island, so that I remember it quite plainly, though, what with one thing and another, it got crowded out of my notes. I was, however, much interested at the time, for it pointed to a possibility of a further and more complex development of these curious parasitic relations; for why should not gulls become, in time, the constant attendants of such chases as these, on the off-chance merely of the skua failing to get the fish that he had forced the bird he was chasing to drop? Here would be a secondary act of piracy grown out of the first and more direct one.