February 1902.FEBRUARY 1902.
FEBRUARY 1902.
Piercingcold weather here of late, with a good deal of frost and occasional snow showers. No matter how heavy the snowfall may be here we only see it falling, as it does not lie long roundourdoors, and only when our gaze is directedArbroathwards—which, you may be sure, is notseldom—are we reminded of its occurrence. The close of last month saw our barometer taxed to its utmost intelligence, and though a tenth higher would have seen its limit, nothing of a phenomenal nature was noted. The solan geese or gannets, which are pretty much in evidence here during the breeding season, foraging for their families on the Bass Rock, gradually disappeared, till during the month of November not one was to be seen. A solitary one was seen in the first week of December, and since then the number sighted has gradually increased, till in the middle of the present month, as many as eight in one string were counted winging their way southward. The Bass Rock, Ailsa Craig, and the outlying stacks of lonely St Kilda, are said to be the only breeding places of these birds in Scotland. At the beginning of the past century they were considered a dainty article of food by the Edinburgh gentry, and the Bass Rock was rented for the purpose of supplying the market, the birds selling at the rate of half-a-crown a-piece. I have seen it stated that themodus operandiof these birds when engaged in fishing is to flit along the surface till fish are sighted, when they rise to a high altitude, close their wings, and drop hawk-like on their prey. This, I venture to think, is scarcely correct. My experience is that when flitting near the surface if fish are sighted they are invariably struck at without rising to a higher elevation. It is a well known fact that objects under water are more easily distinguished from a height than from near the surface, so that it may be taken for granted that the higher these birds are flying when in pursuit of prey the deeper the fish are swimming. Again, when diving from a high altitude, the wings are kept rigidly outspread, and as the tail is never seen spread rudder-like, as in the case of the hawk, any deviation from their line of descent is controlled by the long narrow wings, and only when nearing the “plunge” are they partially closed.
For the past fortnight we have had the company of a solitary seal. His fishing does not seem to be very successful, either in quantity or quality, as the only catch we have seen him negotiating was a saithe the length of a man’s forearm. Playing with it as a cat would a mouse, he would allow it to swim feebly for some distance, then diving he would bring it to the surface, till latterly, with a toss of his head and a thrust with his fore flipper, he quite disembowelled it, an act of charity which the screaming gulls were not slow to appreciate. Although so long here he has not been seen to rest on the rocks; indeed, I only once saw one ashore here, and as we had a somewhat amusing experience with him it will perhaps bear relating. For several days it was seen, as the tide fell, to rest in one particular place a few yards from the base of the tower. Our outer door opens outwards, and is always closed at night, not that we are afraid of burglars, but merely to prevent the entrance of the seas, and for our own general comfort. The opening of this door always alarmed the seal, and sent him into the waterinstanter. Dropping a line from the balcony at low water, we made the end of it fast within a few feet of his accustomed resting place. Next day, as the tide fell and the rocks began to appear, he was seen to take up his former position, yawning lazily as he rolled from side to side in the sunshine. Fixing a four ounce charge of tonite to our electric cable, we quietly lowered it down the line we had already made fast till within about six feet from where he lay, apparently in blissful ignorance of what was happening overhead. When yawning at his widest, we, by means of our magneto-exploder, fired the charge, and,well—he stopped yawning and went away! and his going was about the smartest thing I ever witnessed. The force of the explosion, being unconfined, merely tilted him on his side, but quickly recovering himself he flopped into the water and shot seaward through the gully like a flash, a black line under water denoting his course. Rounding the outer end of the gully, he doubled back on the outside of the reef, and when opposite his original position, made his appearance on the surface, a very much startled seal. His aspect was quite comical as he stood, so to speak, on his tip-toes evidently investigating the cause of his hurried departure.
Several schools of porpoises have been seen this month, presumably in pursuit of herring. To anyone who has seen these animals gambolling in front of a ship’s bows when travelling at her best, the ease with which they maintain their distance is a matter ofsurprise—always on the point of being run down, but ever ahead, snorting playfully as if in derision at the possibility of their being overtaken by their lumbering follower. Off the island of Anticosta, in the Gulf ofStLawrence—where these animals attain a size several times larger than those of our home waters, and are of a creamcolour—I had an interesting view of their manner of suckling their young. I have seen it stated that the mother by muscular compression expels the nutritive fluid, which is absorbed by the young one as it floats to the surface. The operation appeared to me to be one of actual contact. The youngone—which, by the way, is of a slatey-bluecolour—snuggling as close as possible to the mother as she lay somewhat on her side on the surface, all the while exhibiting the tenderest solicitude for her offspring. Truly the one touch of nature which makes the whole world kin. It is surprising to learn the evolution these animals have undergone in order to accommodate themselves to their altered circumstances. Land-dwellers at one stage of the world’s history, but acquiring a taste for fish, they gradually became aquatic in their habits, dispensing with such portions of their anatomy as were no longer necessary, while developing others more appropriate to their new sphere of existence, till, like their big brother the whale, from being a four-footed animal they became quite fish like in appearance, even to the cultivation of a dorsal fin, though still possessing rudimentary traces of their former construction. Change is apparent on every hand in the plan of nature; ages were necessary for the evolution of our present day horse from his five toed ancestors; and after all it does not seem so very startling when the transformation is enacted before our very eyes in a few short stages, as in the case of the common frog, from the gill breathing tadpole to the lung breathing adult. More startling it is to learn that man himself was at one time a gill breather, and, as biologists affirm, still exhibits traces of gill clefts at one stage of his embryonic development.