incubating, besides that the young guillemot is known to leave the ledge whilst quite small, there is no room for doubt on this point.
No; the young are gone. Why, then, do the parents stay? They will rear no second brood, so that it seems as though they love the ledges better than the little fluffy things that they were feeding upon them, up to the moment of their departure. Affection apparently must be bounded by the sea, for whilst the parents, if we suppose them to have accompanied the chicks down, and swum about with them for a little, must have soon flown back, the chicks, owing to the undeveloped state of their wings, would have been unable to make the return journey. It would seem, therefore, that the first night after the down-flight must have separated mother and child for ever; but if this is the case we may well wonder how the rising generation of guillemots are able to support themselves. Up to now they have been fed upon the ledges, but henceforth they must dive and catch fish for themselves. That they should at once and of their own initiative acquire the skill to do this, or learn the art in so very short a time, from the parent birds, hardly seems possible. We must perforce suppose—or at least I must—that either the mother, as is most probable, or both the parents, remain with the chick for a little, feeding it now on the sea as they did before on the ledge, until in time—and no doubt very quickly—it learns to feed itself. But how strange, if this is so, that the grown birds return to the ledges
