Poachers and Poaching. F.L.S. John Watson
to play, and so continue for nearly an hour, when, as if suddenly alarmed, they rush down stream to their fishing grounds, and leave us cold and benumbed. We plod through the meadow beneath the moon and stars, chilled to the marrow by the falling dew.
Otters are still abundant on the banks of most northern streams, as also among the rocks and boulders of the coast-line. Human invasion drives them from their haunts, although, where waters remain unpolluted, they not unfrequently pass up the rivers by towns and villages during the still night. On the margins of the more secluded tarns of the fells, otters, too, are yet found. Fitted for an aquatic existence, the structure of the otter beautifully exhibits the provisions suitable to its mode of life. On land it can travel swiftly, though the water is its best element. Immersed in this, its coat appears smooth and glossy. In pursuing its prey it performs the most graceful movements, doubling and diving so rapidly that it is difficult to follow its evolutions. When fishing, its object is to get beneath the object pursued, as, from the construction of its eyes, which are placed high in the head, it is better enabled to secure its prey. This it seldom fails to do, its whole structure, as already remarked, greatly facilitating its movements in the water. Its uniform dusky brown coat has, like all aquatic creatures, a soft under-fur with long hair above.
The otter generally takes possession of a natural cavity, a drain, or a hole made by the inundation of the stream. The entrance is usually under water, and inclines towards the bank. Situations where the latter is overhung with bushes and with tall water plants in the vicinity are generally chosen. From this the young, when three or four weeks old, betake themselves to the water. If captured now they may easily be domesticated. One of our friends has to-day a young otter, which he leads about in a leash. At Bassenthwaite a man and his son trained a pair of otters to fish in the lake. They would return when called upon, or follow their master home when the fishing was over. The males in spring fight desperately, and once, when hidden, we witnessed a fight which lasted an hour, and so engrossed did the combatants become that we approached and, taking the part of the lesser, shot its aggressor.
And now a word as to the food of the otter. That it destroys fish we are not about to deny. But this liking for fish has become such a stereotyped fact (?) in natural history that it is glibly repeated, parrot-like, and so continues until most readers have come to accept it. The otter destroys but few fish, using the word in its popular acceptation. What it destroys are for food, and not out of love of killing. The greater part of its diet consists of fresh-water crayfish, thousands of which it destroys, and it is for these that long journeys are so frequently made. This does not apply to the pairing season; the wanderings have then another end. Many miles in a night are traversed for these crustaceans, the beds of mountain and moorland streams being tracked to their source, almost every stone on the way being examined. At least upon two occasions have we found the remains of the moor-hen after an otter's meal.
CHAPTER IV.
COURIERS OF THE AIR.
The power of flight being almost exclusively the characteristic attribute of birds, it is somewhat strange that even the most eminent naturalists should be silent upon it. And yet this is almost universally so. Those who mention the speed of flight do so upon the most insufficient evidence, as witness Michelet's statement that the swallow flies at the rate of eighty leagues an hour. Roughly this gives us a thousand miles in four hours; but assuredly, even in its dashes, the swallow does not attain to anything like this speed. The Duke of Argyll is rather under than over the mark when he computes the speed at more than a hundred miles an hour. Here, however, the mechanism of flight in the swallows is carried through an ascending scale, until in the swift it reaches its highest degree of power both in endurance and facility of evolution. Although there are birds which may, and probably do, attain to a speed of one hundred and fifty miles an hour, this remarkable rate is not to be looked for in any of the birds of the swallow kind. There is something fascinating in the idea of eliminating time and space, and with this attribute popular fancy has in some measure clothed the swallows. At the greater rate of speed indicated above the swallow might, as has been stated, breakfast round the Barbican, and take its mid-day siesta in Algiers. This, however, is a popular myth. In their migrations swallows stick close to land, and never leave it unless compelled; they cross straits at the narrowest part, and are among the most fatiguable of birds. From this it will be seen that although swallows may possess considerable speed, they have no great powers of sustained flight or endurance. These attributes belong, in the most marked degree, to several ocean birds.
Any one who has crossed the Atlantic must have noticed that gulls accompany the ship over the whole distance; or, at least, are never absent throughout the voyage. The snowy "sea swallows," as the terns are called, seem quite tireless on the wing; though the petrels and albatross alone deserve the name of oceanic birds. Sir Edwin Arnold, in an account of his voyage to America, writes as follows of the sea-swallows: "Every day we see playing round the ship and skimming up and down the wave-hollows companies of lovely little terns and sea-swallows, the latter no larger than thrushes. These fearless people of the waste have not by any means followed us from land, living, as gulls often will, on the waste thrown from the vessel. They are vague and casual roamers of the ocean, who spying the great steamship from afar, have sailed close up, to see if we are a rock or an island, and will then skim away on their own free and boundless business. Yonder tiny bird with purple and green plumage, his little breast and neck laced with silver, is distant one thousand miles at this moment from a drop of fresh water, and yet cares no more for the fact than did the Irish squire who 'lived twelve miles from a lemon.' If his wings ever grow weary it is but to settle quietly on the bosom of a great billow and suffer it for a time to rock and roll him amid this hissing spendrift, the milky flying foam, and the broken sea-lace which forms and gleams and disappears again upon the dark slopes. When he pleases, a stroke of the small red foot and a beat of the wonderful wing launch him off from the jagged edge of his billow, and he flits past us at one hundred knots an hour, laughing steam and canvas to scorn, and steering for some nameless crag in Labrador or Fundy, or bound, it may be, homeward for some island or marsh of the far-away Irish coast. Marvellously expressive of power as is our untiring engine, which all day and all night throbs and pants and pulses in noisy rhythm under the deck, what a clumsy affair it is compared to the dainty plumes and delicate muscles which carry that pretty, fearless sea-swallow back to his roost."
No deserts seem to bound the range of the petrels, and they are found at every distance from land. Different species inhabit every ocean—from the fulmar in the far north to the giant petrel which extends its flight to the icebanks of the south. Here the Antarctic and snowy petrels appear, floating upon the drift ice, and never leaving these dreary seas. Another bird of immense wing power is the tiny stormy petrel, the smallest web-footed bird known. It belongs to every sea, and although so seeming frail it breasts the utmost fury of the storm, skimming with incredible velocity the trough of the waves, and gliding rapidly over their snowy crests. Petrels have been observed two thousand miles from nearest land, whilst at half that distance Sir James Ross once saw a couple of penguins quietly paddling in the sea. A pair of the rudimentary wings of this bird are lying before me as I write. These are simply featherless paddles, but by their aid so rapidly does the bird swim that it almost defies many of the fishes to equal it. The enormous appetite of the giant penguin (which weighs about eighty pounds) may have something to do with its restricted powers of flight, and in the stomach of one of these Ross found ten pounds of quartz, granite, and trap fragments, swallowed most likely to promote digestion.
But surely the lord of the winged race is the bird which does not rest; and this may almost be said of the man-of-war or frigate bird. He is a navigator who never reaches his bourne, and from his almost ceaseless flight it would seem as though earth and sea were equally prohibited to him. To a bird with such an immense and superior wing apparatus, the metaphor, "he sleeps upon the storm," becomes almost literal. This black, solitary bird is nearly nothing more than wings, his prodigious pinions measuring fifteen feet, even surpassing those of the condor of the Andes. Although sometimes seen four hundred leagues from land, the frigate bird is said to return every night to its solitary roost.
Of all birds, the albatross