Edmund Selous

Bird Watching Edmund Selous

Publisher Marketing: This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1901. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... chapter vii Watching Shags and Guillemots I have referred once or twice before to the cormorant (including under this title the shag), and once to the guillemot. In this chapter I shall treat of both these birds a little more at large, for in the first place they are salient amongst sea fowl, giving a distinctive character to the wild places that they haunt, and secondly, I have watched them closely and patiently. Both are interesting, and the cormorant especially has a winning and amiable character, which I shall the more enjoy bringing before the public because I think that up to the present scant justice has been done to it. Something, perhaps, of the wild and fierce attaches to the popular idea of this bird, due, no doubt, both to its appearance, which has in it something dark and evil-looking, and to the stern, wild scenery of rock and sea with which this is in consonance, and by which it is emphasised. Perhaps the mere name even, which has by no means a harmless sound, has something to do with it. "As with its wings aslant Sails the fierce cormorant Seeking some rocky haunt," says Longfellow--lines which, to me at least, call up a graphic picture of the bird, though I do not know that the first contains anything which is specially characteristic of it; and Milton has recorded--as we may, perhaps, assume--the way in which its uncouth shape appealed to him by making it that which his grand angel-devil chooses, on one occasion, to assume. On another one, it may be remembered, Satan takes for his purposes the form of a toad, and on each, no doubt, the poet, who never appears to yield to the strong temptation (as one would imagine) of loving his great creation, has intended to conyey a general idea of fitness and symbolical similarity as between the disguised b...