The summer homes of the sea-birds.

  • William Miller
Date:
1895
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The summer homes of the sea-birds. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    foliage of Norway, as the leaves were preparing to drop, I saw hosts upon hosts of birds migrating, in regular armies, moving in one plane, up and down in their onward flight, with regular leaders, and seemingly complex evolutions and changes. It was to me a magnificent spectacle. These were, 1 was told, the solan-geese on their yearly migration to the south. The solan-goose was, by gannet-rocks and gannet-coves, pretty familiar to me as the gannet—a bird that is not a bit of a goose at all. But these armies probably consisted of brent geese, migrating to the south in other array than that wherein they move northwards in spring. And it was very delightful to watch the evolutions of these enormous hosts, and these I could trace along the coast for a long time, as our vessel steamed swiftly towards the south, on the same route as the bird-hosts themselves. Among the birds that either breed in these far northern regions, or at least occasionally visit them, we meet with some that are strangely familiar to us. The wheatear and the redstart may be found on the fjelds near Hammerfest ; the hedgewarbler, and the turtle-dove farther north still ; and the very sparrow, both the common bird and its near relative the tree-sparrow, hardly distinguishable the one from the other, had, I heard, got up to Tromso, the capital of Finmark, where, as with us, it makes itself quite at home. The magpie builds its big nest in the fagot piles near the North Cape; the cuckoo, on the heights around, entrusts her egg to the care of the rock-pipit or the wheatear ; the sand-martins, where they cannot find other nesting places, dig their well-known holes in the turf-roofs of the houses; and the crows and the ravens make themselves nuisances by their readiness everywhere to peck at the fish that are hung up to dry. The willow-warbler sings his song here as blithely as he does in England ; and in the most northerly willows that these birds can anywhere find, they build a nice round fluffy nest, lined with the white feathers of the willow-grouse. Of the graceful little tits we find two or three species here, with the self-same ways as their interesting English kindred ; and the fly-catchers, one or two wagtails, and the familiar walk of the starling, as distinguished from the hop of thrush or black- bird, delight the eyes of an English bird-lover among many birds that are new to him, in these far northern regions. To such a bird-lover, however, most of the birds that he meets with are quite new. To him the eider-duck mainly calls up a light and truly delightful coverlet for his bed in very cold weather, but here his boat steams through flocks of these ducks, as he goes northwards; or in the Porsanger Fjord he is shown an island that belongs to the chief magistrate of Finmark, and is strictly preserved for the nesting places of these ducks, whose down forms the most valuable produce of the island. The Lusitania steamed far north to the polar ice, along which the vessel edged for many miles, and the fortunate voyagers on board everywhere found birds of many kinds, with whales and shoals of porpoises, all around them.