The Land's End: A Naturalist's Impressions In West Cornwall, Illustrated

by W. H. Hudson

Gulls are all robbers by instinct but have not the power and courage of the predaceous Bonxie or Great Skua of the Shetlands, a pirate by profession who lives mainly on the labours of others. The gull must fend for himself and levy tribute when he gets the chance, when he can intimidate some other bird or snatch a morsel from his beak. From the gannet he gets nothing; it would be dangerous for him to come in that bird's way, and no sooner is the fish caught than it is swallowed. The gannet takes no more notice of the gull than of a bubble floating on the surface, and probably does not even know that the negligible bird regards his fishing operations with a good deal of interest and hungrily wishes he could have a share in the spoil. But how far gulls will go in their desire to get something for nothing may be seen in the following incident which was witnessed by some fishermen at Sennen Cove, close to the Land's End. A Great Northern Diver made its appearance at the cove and spent a part of the winter there, and as he was not disturbed and grew accustomed to the sight of human beings he lost all shyness and often fished close to the rocks where the men stood watching him. One day they saw him with a small flat fish which he could not swallow; it was too broad to go down his gullet, but he would not let it escape and continued to toss it up and catch it again, as if determined to get it down somehow. Or it may have been that he was only playing with it just as a cat when not hungry plays with a mouse. By and by a black-backed gull swam to him and began following him and making snatches at the flounder each time the diver tossed it up. But the diver would not let him have the fish, he simply turned round to get away from the teasing gull, and the quiet way in which he took it only emboldened the other until he became quite excited and was almost violent in his efforts to get the fish. Then suddenly the diver, dropping the fish, turned on him and struck him like lightning, driving his sharp powerful beak into his neck or the base of the skull. The gull flapped his wings violently once or twice, then turned over and floated away, belly up, quite dead. Instantly after dealing the blow, the diver went down and quickly reappeared with the flounder, and resumed tossing and catching it again, just as if nothing had happened, while the dead gull slowly drifted further and further away.

What struck the men who witnessed the tragic incident as most remarkable was the sudden change in the temper of the diver, when he turned at last on the other, dealt him the swift killing blow, then immediately returned to his play with the fish as if the slaying of that big formidable bird had affected him no more than it would have done to shake off a drop of water. My thought on hearing about it was that the act of the diver was wonderfully like that of many a human being to whom killing is no murder, who kills in a casual way because of some religious or ethical or political idea, or merely because he has been annoyed or stung into a fit of anger, and who, the killing done, recovers his normal placid temper and thinks no more about it.

An exceedingly painful incident of this kind is related by Darwin in describing the natives of Tierra del Fuego in his Voyage of a Naturalist. Another very pathetic case is related by Browning, in the Dramatic Idylls, in which the woodcutter in a Russian village who is able to handle his axe so deftly strikes off the head of a young woman who has just escaped from the wolves that pursued her in the forest. They sprang upon her in her sleigh and dragged her child from her arms; the pious woodcutter thought she should have allowed herself to be torn to pieces before releasing the child. Then, after striking her head off he goes to his cottage, puts down the axe, and plays with his children on the floor and is greatly surprised that any fuss should be made by his fellow-villagers at what he had done.

The gulls have a particularly uncomfortable time when, as occasionally happens during the pilchard fishing, a number of gannets appear to claim their share in the spoil. No sooner has the circle of the seine been completed, forming a pool teeming with fish in the sea as it were, than the gulls are there in a dense crowd. Then if the gannets appear hovering over them and hurling themselves down like rocks into the seine the gulls scatter in consternation and have to wait their turn. The wonder is that the gannets diving with such violence, bird following bird so closely, all in so small an area, do not collide and kill each other. Somehow as by a miracle they escape accidents, and when they have gorged until they can gorge no more they retire to digest their meal at sea, and immediately the gulls return to feast with a tremendous noise and much squabbling, each bird fighting to deprive his neighbour of the fish he picks up. This lasts until the gannets, having quickly digested their first meal or got rid of it by drinking sea-water, return with a fresh appetite for a second one, and the poor gulls are once more compelled to leave that delectable spot, teeming and glittering with myriads of rushing, leaping, terrified pilchards.

At other times, when fishing-birds are attracted to one spot by shoals of mackerel, herring, sprats or pilchards, gulls and gannets feast together very comfortably, and as the gulls take good care not to get in the way of their too energetic neighbours there are probably no accidents. Occasionally at such times they have an opportunity of feeding on the launce or sand-eel, a favourite food of all the rapacious creatures, fish and fowl, that get their living in the sea. The launce is a long slender eel-like silvery fish that has the curious habit of burying itself in the sand, and it is said that when out feeding if pursued it instinctively darts down to the bottom of the sea to escape by burying itself in the sand. Bass and pollack are the greatest persecutors of the launce, and when a number of these greedy fishes come upon a shoal of sand-eels in deep water they get beneath them to hold them up, and surround them as well to prevent their escape. Day, in his British Fishes, states that pollack have been observed acting in this way on the coast of Norway; but many Cornish fishermen have witnessed it too, though it has not been described by Jonathan Couch and other writers on the habits of the native fishes as occurring in our waters. A native of Hayle, a boatman and a keen observer of bird and fish life, gave me the following account of a scene he witnessed in St. Ives Bay, not far from the Godrevy Lighthouse. His attention was attracted by a great concourse of gulls and gannets, and rowing to the spot he found the surface of the sea boiling with an immense shoal of sand-eels rushing about on the surface and leaping clean out of the water in their efforts to escape from their pursuers. It was a very unusual sight, as the shoals of sand-eels are usually small, but here they swarmed at the surface over a very large area—probably six or seven acres. It was a fine bright day and the water being marvellously clear he could see the pollack ranging swiftly about at a considerable depth and rising at intervals to the surface to capture their prey. Meanwhile the birds in hundreds were hovering overhead, the gannets coming down in their usual way like huge stones hurled into the sea, the gulls swooping lightly and snatching their prey and rising with the long silvery wriggling fishes in their beaks.

Every gull thus rising with a launce in its beak was of course instantly pursued and set upon by all the others flying near and had to fight furiously to retain his capture.

That is invariably the gull's way: even when fish are swarming on the surface and easily taken they must give vent to their predatory instincts and waste time and energy in robbing one another and in squabbling and screaming, instead of every bird trying to catch as many as he can for himself. It is very different with the gannet; he never in all his life—and it may be a life of a century or longer for all we know to the contrary—wastes as much energy as would be the equivalent of a single feather's weight in trying to take a morsel out of the beak of another gannet or bird of any kind. One might say that his faculties are so perfect, his power so great, that he has no need to descend to such courses. Indeed, so admirably is he fitted for his sea life, that when we view him in very bad weather, when he is travelling, following the coastline, in an everlasting succession of beautiful curves and wave-like risings and fallings; and when he is fishing, even when the sky is black with tempests and the tumbling ocean is all grey and white with whirling spindrift; when the furious wind has blown the whole tribe of gulls inland many a league, he appears to us as a part of it all—of wave and spray and wind and cloud—a fragment, one of a million, torn away by the blast, into which a guiding spirit or intelligent principle or particle has been blown to make it cohere and give it form and weight and indestructibility.

I can but express it in my blundering fashion, but the thought has been in my mind when, sitting on a rock on some high foreland, I have watched the gannets passing by the hour, travelling to some distant feeding area or to their breeding haunts in the far north; a procession many a league long, but a very thin procession of twos and twos, every bird with his mate, following the trend of the coast, each bird in turn now above the sea, now down in the shelter of a big incoming wave, and every curve and every rise and fall of one so exactly repeated by the other as to give the idea of a bird and its shadow or reflection, with bird and reflection continually changing places.

After seeing the gannet every day for months one would be apt to think that this species is incapable of making a mistake and is beyond reach of accidents, but that cannot be supposed of any living creature, however perfect the correspondence may appear between it and the environment. At Sennen I heard of an extraordinary mishap which befell and caused the destruction of a large number of gannets. It was told to me by several of the fishermen who witnessed it at Sennen Cove, at the Land's End, and by a gentleman of the place, who is a keen ornithologist and was present at the time. A strong wind was blowing straight into the bay, and there was a very big sea on. The sea, they told me, presented a singular appearance on account of the enormous waves rolling in; the village people, in fact, were all out watching it. A large number of gannets were busy fishing and were coming further and further in, following the shoal. Then a wonderful thing happened on this day of wonders; the wind which had been blowing a gale fell quite suddenly and was succeeded in a very few minutes by a perfect calm. Some of the men assured me they had never known such a thing happen before. I have known it once, and that was in South America, when a violent southwest wind which had been blowing for many hours dropped suddenly, and the air was a dead calm before the loud noise of the gale in the trees was out of my ears. The change was disastrous to the gannets; in that windless atmosphere in the sheltered bay and with the sea in that state they could not rise. They were seen struggling on the water and carried shore-wards by the huge incoming waves; but their fellows flying to and fro above them, intent on their prey, did not see or heed their distress; they continued dashing down into the sea, bird after bird, and every one that hurled itself down remained down, until they were all in the sea, all vainly flapping and struggling to keep out and still being carried nearer and nearer to the shore. Then the waves began to fling them out on the flat sandy beach, and as wave followed wave, bringing more and more of the birds, the men and boys who were watching went mad with excitement and set off at a run, every one as he went snatching up a stick or an iron bar or whatever would serve as a weapon. There was no escape for the birds, for their wings could not lift them, and they were slaughtered without mercy, even as shipwrecked men on this dreadful coast in the ancient days had been slaughtered, and the sands were covered with their carcasses. The ancient wreckers got something from the unhappy wretches they slew, but these people got nothing from the gannets. I asked them why they slew the birds, and they could only shrug their shoulders or answer that they had the birds cast out by the sea at their mercy—what was there to do but to kill them? And it was added that after all, being dead, they did serve some good purpose, for by and by a farmer came and carried them away by cartloads to manure his land.