Читать книгу The Land's End: A Naturalist's Impressions In West Cornwall, Illustrated - W. H. Hudson - Страница 10

Table of Contents

Gulls in fishing harbours—Their numbers and beautiful appearance at St. Ives—Different species—Robbing the fishermen—How they are regarded—The Glaucous gull or Burgomaster—Cause of the fishermen's feeling—A demonstration of hungry gulls—A gull tragedy.

TO a bird lover the principal charm of St. Ives is in its gull population. Gulls greatly outnumber all the other wild birds of the town and harbour put together, and though they have not the peculiar fascination of the jackdaw, which is due to that bird's intelligence and amusing rascalities, they are very much more beautiful.

Of all feathered creatures gulls are ever the quickest to discover food thrown accidentally in their way by man. In many lands, crows, vultures, carrion hawks, and omnivorous feeders generally acquire the habit of watching the movements of the human hunter and of travellers in desert places for the sake of his leavings.

In the gulls this habit is universal; their "wide eyes that search the sea" have discovered that where there is a ship or boat something may be picked up by following it, and in all lands where there is a plough to share(s.p.) the soil the plougher is pretty sure to have a following of gulls at his heels. In harbours they are much at home, but are especially attracted to a fishing town, and it would be hard to find one where they make a better appearance than at St. Ives. But not solely on account of their numbers and tameness, since they congregate at all fishing stations and are just as tame and abundant elsewhere. At St. Ives they make a better show because of the picturesque character of the place itself—the small harbour, open to the wide blue bay and the Atlantic, crowded with its forest of tall slim masts resembling a thick grove of larches in winter, while for background there is the little old town, its semicircle of irregular quaint and curious stone-grey and tile-red buildings.

The gulls that congregate here are of several kinds: on most days one can easily count five species, the most abundant being the herring and the lesser black-backed gulls, and with them you generally see one or two great black-backs. Then there are the two small species, the common and the black-headed gull. These, when it comes to a general scramble for the small fishes and other waste, are mere pickers-up of unconsidered trifles on the outskirts of the whirlwind of wings, the real fighting area, and their guttural cries—a familiar sound to Londoners in winter—are drowned in the tempest of hard, piercing, and grinding metallic noises emitted by the bigger birds.

All this noise and fury and scurry of wings of innumerable white forms, mixed up with boats and busy shouting men, comes to be regarded by the people concerned as a necessary part of the whole business, and the bigger the bird crowd and the louder the uproar the better they appear to like it. For their gulls are very dear to them.

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One morning when looking on and enjoying the noisy scene, I saw one of the smaller boats left unattended by the men.

They had thrown a canvas over the fish, but this the gulls soon succeeded in pulling aside; then those overhead converging poured down in the form of a white column, and the boat was covered from stem to stern with a mass of birds madly fighting for the herrings. The men in other boats close by looked on and laughed; by and by they began shouting, but this had no effect, and the struggling and feasting went on until the master of the boat returned and scared them off. He said afterwards that they had devoured half his catch, yet the men who had been standing by looking on had made no real attempt to save the fish.

The gulls know their friends very well; with the man in sea-boots and oilskins they are tamer than any domestic bird; they will take food from his hands and love to settle to rest on the boats and to sit perched like swallows on the mast top. They have not the same confidence towards strangers, and they positively dislike small boys. When boys appear they fly away to a distance. One evening, the men being out of sight, I found three urchins amusing themselves by throwing stones at a few small gulls flying about the sand in search of scraps. "What would you get," I asked them, "if one of the men caught you stoning the gulls?" "Oh!" cried the biggest of the three, drawing his head down between his shoulders in a most expressive way, "we'd get our ears well cuffed."

"Very well," I said, "I'm here in their place to-day to look after the birds." In a moment they dropped their stones and taking to their heels vanished in a neighbouring court.

Yet these very boys in a few years' time, when they will be in the boats too, will have the same feeling as the men, and be ready to inflict the severest punishment on any youngster they may catch throwing a pebble at one of their sacred birds!