and the markings as the guillemot’s. Some have been taken spotless and colourless, like a heron’s; others altogether sienna, as the kestrel’s sometimes is; while between these two extremes of no-colour and all-colour stretches as infinite a variety of markings as on the pebbles on the shore. Perhaps the most beautiful of all are those where the ground is a clear, bright green-blue, and the spots—large and irregularly scattered, of a rich chocolate shading into brown-pink—make on it a strong, bold, well-defined pattern, without any of the intermediate specks and streaks and zigzags that are characteristic of this bird’s eggs. They are not laid in any nest, but on the bare flat rock, sometimes protected from the violence of the wind by lying in an indentation or where the rock is rough faced. But as a rule the guillemot does not seem to expect her egg to be blown off the spot where it is laid, and (though there are woful exceptions) she is right, for in due time a dusky fuzz-ball, with a noble appetite for little fishes, takes the place of each egg.
Then it is, alas for the poor parent guillemots! that the sea-eagle comes on its broad pinions, yelping, and, swift as the wind, swoops down, grazing the surface of the rock, and, regardless of the indignant mob that rises in protest, flaps off with careless wing back to the eyrie, where its eaglets are waiting for food. And every time the sea-eagle comes and goes there is one fuzz-ball less than there was.
“She seeks her aërie hanging
In the mountain-cedar’s hair
And her brood expect the clanging
Of her wings through the wild air,
Sick with famine.”
But if tens are taken, thousands are left, and ere long the old birds, finding their young ones restless, and fearing,
