there. This certainly looks like a partition of office as between the two parents, but it is hardly worth while saying so, for everything one says or thinks one hour or day is contradicted the next. There is little or no uniformity in the actions of birds. That is my constant experience. The other chick has been for long clasped under the parental (left) wing, but whether it has always been the same parent I cannot say, for there is nothing here to distinguish the two. Now, however, there is an interlude, both the parent and chick standing and preening themselves. The chick stands comparatively alone, with nothing between him and the sea. Now he has disappeared, moving a little along the cliff's edge, but soon I see him again, clasped tight beneath the wing of one or other parent, who sits close brooding on the rock. I think there has been a change of parents here, so here is the accustomed contradiction.
Looking down through the glasses at the chick, it appears to me to be feathered, but to have, at least on the back, a close crop of down projecting above them. The beak is nothing like so long as the parents', either actually or in proportion to the chick's size, or the size of its head. The feet, however, are relatively quite as large, or even larger. The bird is getting on in size, and again I wonder why, if it is taken down on the parent's back, this flight is so long delayed. It is difficult, indeed, when one sees the little wings flapped, to think that the chick can fly yet, in any proper sense of the word, but it does not seem to me
