himself much about wind, and still less about the bird that our ancient mariners used to think brought it.
What a shock for the old salts, who dreaded the killing of a petrel, to hear that under the name “Blasquet chickens” they have been eaten on toast, like snipe, and declared to be “delicious eating.” Yet such is the fact; and seeing that the bird does not feed on fish, there is no reason why it should not, unlike most sea-fowl, be palatable.
For the food of petrels, strange to say, is oil. At any rate, nothing else is found in their stomachs, but where the oil comes from—whether they collect it from the surface of the sea, or whether by some chemical process of their own they convert other material into oil—no one can say with certainty.
Oddly enough, too, the little stormy-petrel in its breeding haunts does not fly by day, but feeds its young at night; and here, again, reason is puzzled for an explanation. They lay their eggs in crevices of the rocks, in heaps of débris, or old rabbit-holes; but these are only to be found by searching, as there are no birds on the wing while the sun is shining, and they do not, like all others, betray their nurseries by going to and fro in the daylight with food. What strange contrasts! For more than nine months of the year the petrel is “the playmate of the storm”—
“Where the ocean rolls the proudest,
Through the foam the sea-bird glides”—
always in attendance upon the tempest, an omen of ship-wreck and sea-terror:
“The petrel telleth her tale in vain,
And the mariner curseth the warning bird
Who bringeth him news of the storm unheard;”
and then for the rest of the twelvemonth it lurks in little holes in rocks, under heaps of stones, in rabbit-burrows, coming out only when it is dark, a bat-like creature of dusty crevices and dusky twilight, mortally afraid apparently of everything that moves by day, and shunning on land the men whom at sea it seemed to triumph over and to doom.