The Sea-Eagle—Guillemots—Egg-Gathering—The Paradise of the Puffins—The Stormy-Petrel—The Sea-Eagle’s Victims—The Black-Backed Gull—The Skua—Among the Cormorants and Gulls
CHAPTER VI.
“The Eagle of the sea from Atlas soars
Or Teneriffe’s hoar peak—
The watchful helmsman from the stern descries
And hails her course—
She mounts Alp-high and with her lower’d head
Suspended eyes the bulging sails, disdains
Their tardy course, outflies the hurrying rack,
And disappearing mingles with the clouds.”
Grahame.
THE following lines of Spenser’s, though multitudes have been written upon the eagle, have never been improved upon:
“An eagle in his kingly pride,
Soaring through his wide empire of the air
To weather his broad sails.”
“Sailing with supreme dominion, through the azure deep of air”—“Eagles, golden-feathered, who do tower above us in their beauty, and must reign, in right thereof,”—but it is no use to go on quoting, for the poets’ tributes to their flight alone would fill many pages. To feel the full force of them, to understand how little exaggeration there is in them, one must have seen an eagle, unconscious of observation, at its ease in the air.
I remember how once in India I enjoyed the splendid sight of an “ossifrage” launching itself from its seat upon a huge dead tree into the valley. Something below had attracted its attention, a kite perhaps, or a crow, flying towards carrion, and the enormous bird came hurtling down with a veritable crash of its wings. And then suddenly it checked itself in its fall, and opening its “broad sails” to the utmost, till each feather stood apart from the other, it silently floated away across the valley. The speed of its flight was prodigious, but it was absolutely noiseless, and the great thing, once launched, never moved a feather, but sped away in a straight level line, as if under the attraction of some invisible, irresistible magnet, to a gorge on the other side, and so disappeared from view.
It was a most noble and a memorable performance. First the instant of impetuous downward plunge, so headlong that the wind fairly rattled through its plumage; and then, with such spectral suddenness, the recovery of position, and the imperial tranquillity of its horizontal flight. When the eagle’s wings are fully extended, the tips of the long feathers curve slightly upwards, giving a singular grace to its flight and a very curious impressiveness to the bird’s appearance,