I spent hours of rare happiness at this spot in watching the birds.
I could not have seen and heard them to such advantage if their
breeding-place had been shared with other species. Here the
herring-gulls had the rock to themselves, and looked their best in their
foam-white and pearl-grey plumage and yellow legs and beaks. While I
watched them they watched me; not gathered in groups, but singly or in
pairs, scattered up and down all over the face of the precipice above
me, perched on ledges and on jutting pieces of rock. Standing motionless
thus, beautiful in form and colour, they looked like sculptured figures
of gulls, set up on the projections against the rough dark wall of
rock, just as sculptured figures of angels and saintly men and women
are placed in niches on a cathedral front. At first they appeared quite
indifferent to my presence, although in some instances near enough
for their yellow irides to be visible. While unalarmed they were very
silent, standing in that clear sunshine that gave their whiteness
something of a crystalline appearance; or flying to and fro along the
face of the cliff, purely for the delight of bathing in the warm lucent
air. Gradually a change came over them. One by one those that were on
the wing dropped on to some projection, until they had all settled down,
and, letting my eyes range up and down over the huge wall of rock, it
was plain to see that all the birds were watching me. They had made the
discovery that I was a stranger. In my rough old travel-stained clothes
and tweed hat I might have passed for a Branscombe villager, but I
did no hoeing and digging in one of the cultivated patches; and when
I deliberately sat down on a rock to watch them, they noticed it and
became suspicious; and as time went on and I still remained immovable,
with my eyes fixed on them, the suspicion and anxiety increased and
turned to fear; and those that were sitting on their nests got up and
came close to the edge of the rock, to gaze with the others and join in
the loud chorus of alarm. It was a wonderful sound. Not like the tempest
of noise that may be heard at the breeding-season at Lundy Island, and
at many other stations where birds of several species mix their various
voices--the yammeris and the yowlis, and skrykking, screeking, skrymming
scowlis, and meickle moyes and shoutes, of old Dunbar's wonderful
onomatopoetic lines. Here there was only one species, with a clear
resonant cry, and as eve