The summer homes of the sea-birds.

  • Miller, W. J. C. (William John Clarke), 1832-1903.
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.

    1/6
    Reprinted from Nature Notes, April, 1895, /f. THE SUMMER HOMES OF THE SEA-BIRDS. S we pass along the Western Coast of Norway, we find few spots more interesting than those cliffs that are emphatically called Bird-rocks. From Stavanger, right away northward, round the North Cape to the frontier of Russia, these cliffs rise up, gaunt, lofty, and mostly bare of grass or foliage ; and as we usually see them, from early spring round to late autumn, they are tenanted by multitudes of sea-birds, which, at times, young and old, seem to surpass in number the very sands upon the sea-shore. As we pass in and out of the picturesque fjords that branch off, like the fingers from the palm of the hand, into smaller fjords and still smaller ones, and ramify far into the land, pouring down from many points throughout their course lovely fosses or waterfalls, we still meet with these Bird-rocks, here and there, in going through some narrow channel or winding round some projecting headland. We steam in and out of the pleasant Hardanger Fjord, through the many ramifications of grander and gloomier Sogne, the Nords Fjord, and the Hjorund, past delightful Molde and the Lofoten Islands, round the I^orth Cape to the Porsanger and the Varanger Fjords; and in all these fjords, or in the precipitous cliffs that frown above the fearfully narrow passages that lead to them, or from one to another, we are never without reminiscences of Bird-rocks that we have seen, or that we may look forward soon to see. These are the summer houses of many of our migrant birds; here they have for ages bred without let or hindrance; and here- from they flock, as the long winter of Norway draws on^ to pass the bleak season in regions that extend from our own shores far southward to the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea, or even beyond the Equator to the far distant realms of Africa. Above the waterways there tower aloft miles of elevated snow-fields called Fonds, wherefrom, in the warmth of summer, there pour down the Fosses that form one of the glories of the land; and behind these Fonds lie the mountains or hills, termed Fjelds, on whose slopes or crests, or in the dales that lie between them, breed many such land birds as the woodcock, the fieldfare, and the redwing—called by Linnaeus the nightingale of Scandinavia—which we welcome to our country before there