Note 41 — THE FYRST PART OF THE NAUIGATION INTO THE NORTH SEAS.
Reading edition
Eenderley aert van voghelen—a certain kind of birds. This strange mistake of the translator has given occasion to frequent comment. It is the more unaccountable, as the original work contains a pictorial representation of these birds,—noordtsche papegagen, or northern parrots, as they are there called,—in connection with the plan of Lomsbay; and it is also expressly stated, that the bay “has its name from the birds which dwell there in great numbers. They are large in the body and small in the wing, so that it is surprising how their little wings can carry their heavy bodies. They have their nests on steep rocks, in order to be secure from animals, and they sit on only one egg at a time. They were not afraid of us; and when we climbed up to any of their nests, the others round about did not fly away.”
The bird in question is the Brunnich’s Guillemot. (Alca Arra.) It is described and figured in the fifth volume of Gould’s Birds of Europe, and in Yarrell’s British Birds.
An assemblage of these birds, such as is here described by the author, “is called by the Russians a ‘bazar’. Thus this Persian word has been carried by Russian walrus-hunters to the rocks of the icy sea, and there for want of human inhabitants applied to birds.”—Baer, in Berghaus’s Annalen, vol. xviii, p. 23. ↑