The breeze was a kiss from Heaven, the sky a
vaulted sapphire, the sea a million dimples of
liquid, lucid, gold.

BIRD-GAROTTERS.

"SKUA! skui! skua! skui!" are the responsive
cries, male and female, by which certain
very singular sea-birds name and announce
themselves in the world of water-fowl life. And,
it may be remarked, that the best names of
animals are those which they give themselves by
their appearance or their voices when proclaiming
their presence in their own circles. For the
crakes concealed in the corn, the cock strutting
in the farm-yard, the crow bustling in the
tree-top, the murooks running on the sand,
and the kittiwakes arranged on the cliff, have
named themselves better, more characteristically,
more memorably, and more recognisably, than
ever they have been designated by any of the
naming Adams of systematic science. Language
preserves and uses the terms of exploded theories
and superstitions, and the universe of living
creatures having been metaphorically called the
wonderful chain of being, the skuas have been
described as links between the gulls and the
birds of prey. They indeed have some of the
marks of the gulls, the petrels, and the falcons.
Gulls hunt the fish-shoals of arctical, and petrels
those of tropical seas; while the range of the
skuas, hunting fish-hunters for fish, seems to
make them free denizens of both hemispheres,
and all oceans. Without any extravagant
stretch of metaphor, they may be described as
birds preying as garotters upon gulls, lyres,
kittiwakes, cormorants, and terns. Indeed, I
first heard of garotting as a Spanish mode of
choking the life out of criminals; it is now used
to describe how certain criminals choke honest
people to rob them of their property; and it
is literally by threatening them in a somewhat
similar way that the skuas despoil their
victims of the fish they have caught. The
bird-wise hence call them Lestridæ— robbers or
pirates.

Four British kinds or species are described in
this group or genus, by Yarrell and Macgillivray.
A specimen of what may prove to be a
fifth— a dwarf species— has been shown to me,
but until more is known about it, there would
be little propriety in describing it here. As it
is when the evenings are long and dark that the
garotters prowl for prey, it is when the autumnal
gales are whistling around houses, rattling in
windows, and rumbling in chimneys, when waves
are dashing about great boulders, thrashing down
stone walls, and shattering stranded ships, that
the storm circles sweep the skuas, which have
obtained the attention of the students of birds,
upon the coasts of Norway, Denmark, Holland,
Belgium, France, and the British islands. The
earlier British describers, such as Willughby
and Bewick, no doubt knew some individuals of
the more common species; but it is only within
the last forty years that the skuas have been
defined as a distinct group. They are, in fact,
still so imperfectly known, that physiologists
cannot fail to be rewarded for studying their
structure, and observers for espying their habits,
by discovering marvels. In all the seven or
eight thousand kinds of recorded birds, vultures,
perchers, climbers, fliers, walkers, waders, and
swimmers, I wot not of a more singular group
than these bold, strong, web-footed pirates.

In saying this, I do not forget the wonders
of the bird kingdom, because they broaden
themselves on the air in flying. The diornis
must have been as tall as a giraffe, and there
are birds as small as a humble-bee. There
are birds which run faster than a race-horse,
and others which, in flying, double the speed
of the fastest express train. There are birds
insufferably ugly, and birds ravishingly lovely.
Many birds make noises torturing to the ear;
and not a few can enchant musicians with
delight. Nothing is more astonishing than the
powers of seeing of some birds, who can
scarcely smell, except the faculty of smelling
belonging to others who can scarcely
see. The eagles fly up in spirals until lost in
the blue; and the petrels sleep calmly in the
deep ravines between the mountain waves.
Birds sew and birds weave their nests; and
there are birds which make bowers to play in.
Certain birds live by grubbing up bulbous roots
in the deserts; and, in strange contrast to them,
the skuas obtain their food by forcing other
marine birds to throw up the fish in their gullets.
Birds are the only animals men have seriously
envied. The wings of the dove were envied of
old. An eloquent man, recently deceased, was
once rowed in a boat under some rock ledges in
the north inhabited by water-fowl, and he said:
"I envy these birds. I envy their freedom of
three elements—land, sea, and air; they walk,
they fly, they swim, they dive, whilst I am
confined to this wooden fabric with only the
thickness of a half-inch board between me and
drowning."

Favourite British haunts of the skuas are the
Faroe and Shetland islands and the Hebrides.
Fowl island, or Foula, the ultima thule of
Agricola, is noted for them. The skua is there
called the bonxie. The bonxie is the terror and
tyrant of all the birds of this bird island. From
a basement of primitive rocks five conical hills
rise towering up; the highest, called the Kaim,
rising thirteen hundred feet sheer and straight
up above the sea. The observer on the ridges of
the rocks sees between him and the vast
Atlantic, hovering in mid-air, clouds of maws,
kittiwakes, lyres, sea-parrots, and cormorants.
At rest, the cormorants occupy the lower ledges
of the rocks, the kittiwakes whiten a cliff of
their own, on one of the higher ledges are the
gulls, on another are the lyres, and highest of all
and surveying all are the bonxies. As when
flying about they cloud the sky, when swimming
they cover the sea. The welkin is often deafened
with their screams. Among these swarms,
gliding swiftly and pouncing unerringly, the
skuas hunt the busiest of the busy, spoiling the