The latter are sitting-birds, for the eggs are so large as compared with the mothers that they cannot be sate upon in the ordinary brooding manner of other fowls. So the guillemot, when she wishes to sit, walks up to her egg and then with her beak pushes it between her legs, and so straddling as it were over it, she remains always at an angle, her body resting against the egg, instead of nestling down upon it.
Long before the invaders’ boat comes into the shadow of the cliff, the birds take alarm at the visitation, and at first by dozens, then by hundreds, and finally by their thousands, spring upwards or dive downwards from their places, and fill the air with an indescribable murmur and flurry of wings—
“Far adown, like snow
Shook from the bosom of a wintry cloud,
And drifting on the wind in feathery flakes.”
But the brave guillemots do not scream or cry out. Some of them grunt their dissatisfaction at disturbance, and but for this they betray no symptoms of annoyance or anger. Nor do they circle round their threatened home, but rising from their places in a fast-thickening cloud, they scatter for a minute or two through the air, and then settle upon the sea and wait.
“There on the waters floating like a fleet
Of tiny vessels, argosies complete
Such as brave Gulliver deep-wading, drew
‘Victorious from the ports of Blefuscu.’”
Nothing, surely, can be more beautiful than the sudden uprising of many birds, whether the scarlet battalions of flamingoes leaving in sumptuous tumult the Egyptian marshes; the gay parrot flights when changing feeding-grounds in the Australian bush, or this sight of our myriad guillemots as with one accord they fill the air with their white wings, and, beautifully stooping to the sea, spread themselves in a sheet of pied dots upon the green water. And as you land you feel that all those thousands of eager eyes are watching you, thousands of little hearts thumping with misgiving at your intrusion. And here and there one bird is sometimes seen still bravely “holding the fort,” not with any defiance, but a calm, good-soldierly courage that commands respect. And now and again a mother will return, too anxious about her egg to remember the risk to herself, or, remembering it, too anxious to care about the risk; she comes with hurrying wing, and, before the very eyes of the unmannerly trespasser, takes possession of her treasure, and tucking it in between her legs turns her back upon the company and trusts to Kismet for the result.
But those gaunt and grim-faced rocks, ribbed and wrinkled by the wear-and-tear of sea and weather, are only the nurseries of the guillemots, not their homes; for they live for nine months of the year upon the dancing sea, never coming back to the solid crags at all. Early in spring the first of them, the advanced couriers of the colony, reappear from the ocean, reconnoitring their egg-towers, and then they disappear again, as if to convey the news to the rest that the earth still stands where it did. And then about May the guillemots begin to come in earnest, and, astounding as the fact is, each bird actually seems to remember the very spot upon which it laid its eggs the year before, for we are told that the professional egg-hunters, who for a score of years or more have regularly rifled the sea-birds’ terraces, are accustomed to find, year after year, in particular places, eggs of a particular shape, or size, or colour. For there are few eggs, if any, that differ so boldly both in the ground colour
