Collins New Naturalist Library
28
Sea-Birds
James Fisher and R. M. Lockler
JAMES FISHER M.A.
JOHN GILMOUR M.A.
JULIAN HUXLEY M.A. D.SC. F.R.S.
L. DUDLEY STAMP C.B.E. D.LIT. D.SC.
PHOTOGRAPHIC EDITOR:
ERIC HOSKING F.R.P.S.
The aim of this series is to interest the general reader in the wild life of Britain by recapturing the inquiring spirit of the old naturalists. The Editors believe that the natural pride of the British public in the native fauna and flora, to which must be added concern for their conservation, is best fostered by maintaining a high standard of accuracy combined with clarity of exposition in presenting the results of modern scientific research. The plants and animals are described in relation to their homes and habitats and are portrayed in the full beauty of their natural colours, by the latest method of colour photography and reproduction.
To
JULIAN HUXLEY
in gratitude for his guidance
and encouragement,and in recollection of the
many happy days we have spent together,
watching sea-birds
Table of Contents
CHAPTER 1 THE NORTH ATLANTIC OCEAN: ITS STRUCTURE AND ITS SEA-BIRDS
CHAPTER 2 EVOLUTION AND THE NORTH ATLANTIC SEA-BIRDS
CHAPTER 3 SEA-BIRD NUMBERS AND MAN
CHAPTER 4 WHAT CONTROLS THE NUMBERS OF SEA-BIRDS?
CHAPTER 5 SEA-BIRD MOVEMENTS
CHAPTER 6 NAVIGATION BY SEA-BIRDS
CHAPTER 7 SOCIAL AND SEXUAL BEHAVIOUR
CHAPTER 8 THE TUBENOSES
CHAPTER 9 THE PELICANS
CHAPTER 10 THE SKUAS
CHAPTER 11 THE GULLS
CHAPTER 12 TERNS AND SKIMMERS
CHAPTER 13 THE AUKS
APPENDIX LIST OF SEA-BIRDS OF THE NORTH ATLANTIC AND THEIR DISTRIBUTION
IT IS NATURAL that in a series dealing with the wild life of the British Isles sea-birds would be a subject planned for early publication; and in fact this book was announced as forthcoming five years ago. That it has not been completed earlier is not due to any want of industry on the part of its authors. On the contrary, in their researches for this book they have found their subject so absorbing that they have made the interval an opportunity to continue to publish numerous scientific papers, and two monographs, on sea-birds. James Fisher is the author of The Fulmar (1952); and R. M. Lockley, author of Shearwaters (1942), has just published Puffins (1953). There could, in fact, hardly be any other pair of authors better qualified to describe the sea-birds of the North Atlantic than these with their experience of many years of field work and visits along the coast and islands, from Spitsbergen and Iceland in the cool north, to Madeira and the Salvages in the warm south, of that great demi-ocean. They have made their visits often together, and lived much on the small remote islands where sea-birds breed.
The North Atlantic, busiest ocean in the world, is revealed in the opening chapters not as a monotonous watery plain, but as an intricately varied, densely inhabited foraging ground for sea-birds. This avian community, though remarkably homogeneous in different sections of the broad expanse of the North Atlantic, is fascinating in the variety of the species that compose it, and in the complexity of their movements and migrations. The annual migrations of some species extend the total range of the community from the arctic to the antarctic. These long transatlantic migrations, verified by ringing, take species from east to west between Europe and North America, and from north to south between Greenland and South Africa, Britain and South America.
The authors tell us of the primitive progenitors of the sea-birds, dating from over sixty
