No “Scilly-scape,” if I may use the word, seems complete without a few gulls. We see them circling and wheeling high above us; dropping, suddenly, to rest upon the dancing waves; chasing each other in turn from the tops of the chimneys; sitting in rows on the ridges of the roofs; quarrelling for fish over St. Mary’s Pool; following the plough or harrow in greedy quest of worms; or standing stock-still on the rocks or sands, at equal distances from each other, and all primly facing the same way.
Herring-gulls, black-headed, and great and lesser black-backed are all plentiful.
The black-backed gulls are fierce and savage fellows. They will carry off young guillemots and kittiwakes in their powerful beaks when the parent-bird is out of the way, and kill and eat them; and they are ruthless robbers of eggs.
The great cormorant, or sea-crow (from the French of which latter name, “corbeau marin,” his ordinary name is taken) is not so common in Scilly as the smaller kind, the green or crested cormorant, or shag.
Shags may be seen in great numbers round the islands, swimming so low in the water that they look only like the tops of walking-sticks above the waves; and propelling their thin and keel-shaped bodies forward by using their wings as oars. Suddenly they disappear head first into the water, reappearing after what seems a very long time, in quite a different direction, and some distance away.
All cormorants are voracious (is not their very name a by-word for greed?), and they consume great quantities of fish, so they are no friend to the fisherman.
Shags are amongst the earliest breeders, and they are worth watching during their love-making, rubbing their snaky heads together and performing strange, ungainly antics. They make rough, untidy nests, with three or four eggs, on many of the uninhabited islands. If you go near them when they are sitting on their eggs, they will hiss at you like geese.
A SHAG PARLIAMENT
In spring tens of thousands of visitors arrive in flocks, for the breeding-season—puffins, Manx shearwaters, guillemots, razor-bills, terns, storm-petrels, and many non-resident gulls.