can read of its eggs being cooked by the million without any keener feeling of regret than if they were apples. And, after all, the wholesale robbery of their nests does not reduce their myriads, for more than enough are hatched every year to fill the gaps caused by death. Being, too, so courageous, the gull escapes persecution by its larger companions, and even the sea-eagle prefers, with so large a choice of more timid victims, to leave such obstreperous birds alone. When threatened by the great bird of prey they join for the common defence, and the eagle is often seen, at long distances from the breeding-places, pursued by shouting gulls, and ignominiously mobbed out to sea.
With them, on these retaliatory sallies, goes that most intrepid of sea-fowl, the skua—one of the many birds that the sailor calls “molly-hawks,” and that the lesser creatures dread like a bird of prey. For such it really is, living chiefly upon the fish the other birds have caught, upon the birds themselves, and during the nesting season upon the eggs and young of all species indiscriminately: so reckless in attack that nothing on wings dares to oppose it, and so powerful that full-grown gulls, if they persist in the fight, succumb to it. He laughs the sea-eagle to scorn, challenging it by loud squalls to a duel. But the erne knows better than to join in a conflict from which neither honour nor profit can come, and spreading his great square-cut wings to the breeze, drifts swiftly away from the spot over the moorland that the skua calls its own. Where the herring-fishers are at work, there the skua is sure to be, gobbling as much as it can find for itself, and chasing all the other birds to make them drop their shares. Nor when there are eggs in its nest does the skua hesitate to threaten human beings that approach it, and indeed actually to attack them; while there are few dogs, if any, that have ever encountered an angry skua, and had experience of its sharp beak and battering wings, that care to face the fierce fowl a second time.