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National Geographic : 1947 May
Contents
Lundy, Treasure Island of Birds Keepers of Lundy's North Light Live on a Wild, Bleak Promontory The light keeps twin vigil with its sister beacon on the southeast point, some three miles away. A natural tunnel, 60 feet high and 800 feet long, pierces this bold headland, favorite haunt of nesting sea birds. A boat can sail through at high water. Fresh-water "Virgin's Spring" bubbles up from its floor. The sea birds of Lundy must consume an enormous quantity of fish, especially during the height of the breeding season, but it seems to make no measurable difference in the supply. The birds of Lundy are a serial story of the centuries, a feathered Odyssey of exploration, pioneering, and pilgrimage, with a homing in stinct thrown in. Most of the migrants arrive and pass through by day; comparatively few settle and breed. They arrive in wind-blown spring months, glimpse a verdant isle that looks good, a journey's end, a promised land. The noise of the birds joins the ceaseless undertone of the surf in a chorus that is at times almost cosmic. Indeed, as you ap proach a closely packed colony of breeding sea birds, the voices of the wind, waves, and birds combined are almost deafening. They are there in their armies-black-backed gulls, puffins, guillemots, kittiwakes, razorbills, shags, cormorants, shearwaters, and oyster catchers (pages 688 and 693). Birds Link Lundy with Distant Lands It is fascinating to watch the bird clouds of Lundy. I was stirred by the strong lines of feathered flight linking Lundy with other countries, and my mind explored the ro mance of these many visitors or settlers, some of them, perhaps, unconscious links with the great New World while man believed the globe to be flat and confined to the continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa. The birds, of course, may have known better, but that is still part of the unwritten story of Lundy. Could some of them have 683
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