A Gannet On Lundy Island

Marga was eight days out of her shell when she first opened her eyes and saw the world as it looks from the sea-girt ledges of Gannet Rock, a little promontory of Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel. Marga's mother and father were ridiculously proud of her. They thought her the most beautiful baby gannet on the rock, and there were easily a hundred other babies all about Marga's age. But anybody who looked at Marga without the fond eye of a parent would have thought she was the ugliest little creature in existence, more like a frog than a bird, with only a few pathetic feather-tufts to cover her wrinkled skin which was blotched with sickly browns and blues; her head was still much too large for her body, her wings as useless as a human baby's legs, and her sole accomplishment was opening her mouth enormously and peeping for food until she became so hungry that the peep rose to a howling squawk.

Just as her parents thought Marga beautiful, so Marga found the world that burst upon her sight very wonderful, indeed. Before she had known only a state of huddling blindness; she could feel the sun warm upon her but could not see it; she grew hungry and was fed; she was cold and her mother came and sat down upon her and warmed her. Now suddenly all was different. Far below her, three hundred feet, the black stone cliff fell away, with the blue wrinkled sea slapping at its side, level as a floor, shimmering as silk, lulled in the warmth and peace of a mid-July. From little crevices in the cliff flowers nodded at her, little bright blossoms of thrift and campion, and long grasses that whistled in the light breeze. Marga even liked the smell of fish and seaweed decaying in the sun, and best of all she liked the gentle noises that her plump mother made, waddling about on the ledge beside her, and the cry of her father fishing not far off in the sea—"Carra! Carrak!"—a war cry of triumph as he fell like a plummet into the waves.

It meant that Marga's dinner was on the way. And presently dinner came. With a graceful sweep her father alighted on the ledge and stood there poised, his wings still half spread, opening his big kind beak. Marga put her stumpy little bill between her father's long mandibles and pulled out of his mouth and throat the herring that her father had caught and half digested for her baby stomach, and gulped it down in three convulsive motions of her neck and head. Then Marga closed her eyes, and lulled by the crooning of the summer sea and the plaintive, ceaseless "kittawee! kittawee!'' of the gulls, she fell asleep under the shade of the little tuft of thrift that bloomed and nodded above her nest.

By: davidbunch

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