He lets me stroke him, and though, when I approach my finger to his face, he opens his beak, yet he cannot be said to show much fierceness. The father and mother sail overhead, and once the chick reaches up with its neck stretched straight into the air, and opening its mandibles widely and excitedly, utters a thin little sound. This is to the parents, I feel sure—a cry of distress—and has no reference to me, unless it be to call a rescue. It seems like this, certainly, yet neither of them make, for some time, even a pretence of swooping at me. Now, however, they begin, but always swerve off when some yards away. Meanwhile the chick has run off; but when I follow him I find him just as he was before, crouched against a little bank of heather, with his head pressed somewhat into it. It is curious how he now, a second time, lets me stroke him, without in the least moving.
This instinct of crouching and lying still when young is one which both the skuas here share with terns, gulls, peewits, etc. All of them lie in a very marked attitude, with the head and neck stretched straight out along the ground; yet all of them, as soon as they learn to fly, quite give up this habit. The stone-curlew, however, which, when young, has a precisely similar one, is supposed to keep it through life, but though this may be the case, I am convinced, from my own observation, that the grown bird acts in this manner far less frequently. To run with great swiftness, and then, if they think it worth while, to fly, is
