_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.
[Illustration: 8037]
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!
[Illustration: 0039]
One day I caught sight of a large ivory-white gull of an unknown species
sitting on the water some distance from the shore, and was very anxious
to see more of this bird. Two or three days later I was with an artist
friend in his studio, and was standing at the window which looks upon
a sandy cove at the back of the town. By and by a wave of the incoming
tide threw up a dead dogfish about three feet long on the white sand
within fifty yards of the window. Scarcely was the fish left by the
retiring water before a big white-winged gull dropped down upon it--the
very bird I had been hoping to encounter again! There it remained,
trying to tear a hole in the tough skin, fully five minutes before
the returning water took the fish away, so that I had a good chance of
examining it through a binocular. It was considerably bigger than the
herring gull, with a much more formidable beak and altogether a bolder
appearance, and the entire plumage was of a chalky white. It was a
Glaucous gull--the famous Burgomaster of the Arctic Sea, probably a
female in immature plumage. In a few moments other gulls dropped down
to get a bite--three herring and one black-backed gull with some smaller
gulls--but they were not allowed to taste the fish. When one attempted
to come near it the white gull looked fixedly at him a couple of
moments, then drawing in its head suddenly tipped its beak upwards--an
expressive gull gesture corresponding to the snarl of a dog when he is
feeding and other dogs approach him. It produced a marked effect on the
other gulls; perhaps the Burgomaster, a rare visitor to our seas, was
known, from hearsay, to them as a great tyrant.
Talking of this noble stranger to one of the fishermen, I remarked that
if a bird collector happened to be about he would certainly have that
bird even if compelled to fire into the whole crowd of gulls to kill it.
"Then," he returned, "perhaps our men would kill him!"
The curious point is that this feeling should exist and be so strong
in a people who have little or no regard for birds generally. The most
religious of men, they are at the same time the least humane. The gull
they tell you is the fisherman's friend; but other sea-birds, which he
kills without compunction--the gannet, for instance--are useful to
him in the same way as the gull. They also say that the gulls keep the
harbour sweet and clean; an explanation probably invented for them by
some stranger within their gates. The fact is, they cherish an affection
for the gulls, though they refuse to confess it, and, being what they
are by race, this feeling has acquired the character of a superstition.
To injure a gull wilfully is to invite disaster. It may be that the
origin of the feeling is simply the fact that gulls gather in vociferous
crowds round the boats and in the harbour when the fishing has
prospered, and in this way become associated in the fisherman's mind
with all those agreeable ideas or images and emotions connected with a
good catch--smiles and cheerful words of greeting in the home, with food
in abundance, money for the rent and for needed clothes and other good
things for the little ones.
On the other hand we may have here a survival of an older superstition,
a notion that gulls are in some degree supernatural beings, perhaps
drowned mariners and fishermen returned in bird forms to haunt their
ancient homes and associate with their human fellow-creatures. The
feeling is certainly very strong: I was told that some of the fishermen
even in their times of greatest scarcity will always manage at mealtime
to put a few crusts and scraps of food into their pockets to throw to
the gulls in the harbour.
[Illustration: 0043]
From all this it might appear that the gulls at St. Ives are having an
exceedingly good time, but they are not wholly happy--not happy every
day, as they very soon let me know. The fishermen, like the Cornish
people generally, are strict Sabbatarians, and from Friday night or
Saturday morning, when the boats come in, they do not go out again until
the following Monday evening. In a neighbouring fishing village the
boats are taken out at the stroke of twelve on Sunday night. The St.
Ives men do not like to run it so fine, and the gulls are never able
to understand this long break in the fishing. On the Saturday, after
feeding, they retire to the sea and the rocks, where they pass the
day comfortably enough, sitting with beaks to the wind and digesting a
plentiful meal. On Sunday morning they congregate in the harbour with
empty stomachs only to find the boats lying empty and idle and all the
men away; they do not like it, but they put up with it, and by and by
loiter off to pick up what they can for themselves, or to wait patiently
on the sea and the rocks, through another long twenty-four hours. On
Monday morning they are very hungry indeed, and come in with stomachs
that scream for food. They come in their thousands, and still nothing
for them--the boats lying empty and idle, the men still at home in bed
and no movement in the harbour! They cannot and they will not endure it.
Then begins a tremendous demonstration of the unemployed. On my first
Monday I was roused from slumber before daylight by the uproar. It
was not now that tempest and tangle of broken, squealing and grinding
metallic noises emitted by the big gulls when they are in numbers
fighting over their food, it was the loud long wailing call of the bird,
incessantly repeated, a thousand wailing like one, and at intervals the
dreary laughter-like chorus of short reiterated cries; then again the
insistent wailing calls. When it became light they could be seen as a
white cloud hanging over the harbour, the birds moving round and round
over the idle boats in endless procession, and this went on for about an
hour, when, finding that nothing came of it all, they went sadly away.
On yet another morning I was awakened before daylight, but this was a
happy occasion, the boats having come in during the small hours laden
with the biggest catch of the season. The noise of the birds made me get
up and dress in a hurry to go and find out what it was all about. For an
hour and a half I stood at the end of the little stone pier watching the
cloud and whirlwind of vociferous birds, and should have remained longer
but for a singular accident--a little gull tragedy--which brought
a sudden end to the feast. The men in fifty boats while occupied in
disengaging the fish from the nets were continually throwing the small
useless fishes away, and these, falling all round in the water, brought
down a perpetual rush and rain of gulls from overhead; everywhere they
were frantically struggling on the water, while every bird rising with
a fish in his beak was instantly swooped down upon and chased by the
others. Now one of the excited birds while rushing down by chance struck
a rope or spar and fell into the water at the side of a boat, about
forty yards from where I was standing. It was a herring gull in mature
plumage, and its wing was broken. The bird could not understand this; it
made frantic efforts to rise, but the whole force exerted being in one
wing merely caused it to spin rapidly round and round. These struggles
eventually caused the shattered bone to break through the skin; the
blood began to flow and redden the plumage on one side. This was again
and again washed off in the succeeding struggles to rise, but every time
a pause came the feathers were reddened afresh. At length the poor thing
became convinced that it could no longer fly, that it could only swim,
and at once ceasing to struggle it swam away from the boats and
out towards the open bay. Hardly had it gone a dozen yards from the
boat-side where it had fallen before some of the gulls flying near
observed it for the first time, and dropping to within three or four
yards of the surface hovered over it. Then a strange thing happened.
Instantly, as if a shot had been fired to silence them, the uproar in
the harbour ceased; the hundreds of gulls fighting on the water rose up
simultaneously to join the cloud of birds above, and the whole concourse
moved silently away in one direction, forming a dense crowd above the
wounded bird. In this formation, suspended at a height of about thirty
yards over and moving with him, they travelled slowly out into the
middle of the bay.
The silence and stillness in the harbour seemed strange after that
tempest of noise and motion, for not a bird had remained behind, nor did
one return for at least half an hour; then in small companies they began
to straggle back to resume the interrupted feast.
[Illustration: 0047]