At first the skua had been regarded as unfit for human food, but Skelton on a sledding trip had caught one in a noose and promptly put it into the pot.
And the result was so satisfactory that the skuaat once began to figure prominently on the menu.
The skua besides eats eggs of other birds, especially of eiders and geese.
The skua in this way commonly takes part in the plundering of every eider island.
The skuabreeds upon low, unsheltered, often water-drenched headlands and islands, where it lays one or two eggs on the bare ground, often without trace of a nest.
It is labben, the common skua (Lestris parasitica, L.
As the skua pursues the kittiwake and the glaucous gull, it is in its turn pursued with extraordinary fierceness by the little swiftly-flying and daring bird taernan, the Arctic tern (Sterna macroura, Naum.
Masses of Adelie penguins and chicks constituted the main population, and skua gulls with eggs were also observed.
Three days later, at the call of the season, a skua gull came flapping over the Hut.
A venturesome skua gull appeared at lunch time, just as an observation for latitude was being taken.
Skua gulls were plentiful and washed themselves, with a great flapping of wings, in the shallow waters at the edge of the lakes.
Attached to each rookery was a pair of skua gulls, who swooped down and quickly flew off with any eggs left for a moment untended.
Skua gulls mysteriously appeared, snow petrels hovered along the rocky ridges and odd seals landed on the wind-raked harbour ice.
Hundreds of snow petrels flew about and some stray skuagulls were seen.
Almost immediately the frozen carcase was mutilated and torn by skua gulls.
Stewed skua was the feature of our Christmas Eve supper.
While the sledges were being loaded, ten skua gulls paid us a visit, and, as roastskua is a very pleasant change of food, Jones shot six of them.
The great, or common skua is rarely seen in Gairloch, but may be occasionally observed attending on parties of gulls, whom it robs of the fish they catch.
This skua occasionally occurs in Gairloch, but is not abundant.
The Great Skua still breeds in sadly reduced numbers on the Shetland and Faroee Islands, but is rarely met with in Norfolk.
Great Skua (Stercorarius catarrhactes) under the name of Catarracta, a skin of which he says was sent him by Dr.
Walter Needham, and rightly identified it with the Skua which Hoier sent to Clusius, but his figure is evidently drawn from a skin of the Great Black-backed Gull.
In hard winters I have also met with that large & strong billd fowle wch clusius describeth by the name of Skua Hoyeri[10] [fr struck out] sent him from the faro Island by Hoierus a physitian.
Twice I have met with a Skua Hoyeri [see Note 10] the draught whereof I also have.
A dusky, nearly brown--for they vary much in color--female skua came with him.
It was what was unseen that the skua was thinking about.
He seemed to know nothing about theskua till that worthy was upon him, and then, as he fled, after a furious chase of about three minutes, he suddenly surrendered by letting fall all his spoil.
The skua could see its little, cruel eyes gleaming like gimlet-holes in the wall of a lighted room.
Ten minutes later the skua was calmly and safely asleep upon the top of a frowning black stack of rock, untroubled, I think, even by dreams of the terrible things he had gone through.
The skua caught up one sprat before it hit the surface, but, being too late to overtake the rest, seemed to take no further notice of them, but swept on, to settle upon the water a mile away and preen himself.
She revealed for an instant, as she shone on the spot on the sand where the skua had sat, the fact that the sand seemed to be alive, horribly alive, as if the pebbles had taken legs and ran about.
The skua was scarcely bleeding at all now, but he had left enough of a trail for them--they who make a specialty of the job.
On Christmas Day we took a holiday, and Lindström prepared a banquet of skua gulls.
Round about the deck lay dead and half-dead skua gulls in heaps.
A great number of birds, skua gulls, snowy petrels and Antarctic petrels, flew round the ship and gave us many a good "roast ptarmigan.
As we were leaving this old friend and setting our course as it advised, to our unspeakable astonishment two great birds -- skua gulls -- suddenly came flying straight towards us.
An hour after breaking camp this morning two snowy petrels came sailing over us; a little while later a couple of skua gulls.
The skua gulls settled very near us, and the dogs, no doubt taking them for baby seals, were of course ready to break the line of march, and go off hunting, but their keenness soon passed when they discovered that the game had wings.
His special dish was penguins and skua gulls in cream sauce.
As the day wore on skua gulls, looking upon us as certain carrion, settled down comfortably near us to await developments.
Two or more penguins will combine to push a third in front of them against a skua gull, which is one of their enemies, for he eats their eggs or their young if he gets the chance.
We never again saw a little waterfall such as was now tumbling down the rocks from Skua Lake into the sea.
There are two small lakes, called Skua Lake and Island Lake respectively.
Where the herring-fishers are at work, there the skua is sure to be, gobbling as much as it can find for itself, and chasing all the other birds to make them drop their shares.
The Skuas, called also Skua Gulls, are sufficiently distinguished from the true Gulls by their strong hooked bills and talons, and by the habits of daring and voracity founded on these characters.
The following account of the capture of one of these birds, in 1844, indicates a bird of unusual daring and voracity: "About the beginning of last October, a Pomarine Skua was taken in the adjoining village of Ovingdean.
I have seen a sick skua hunted continuously for over an hour by a mob of its own kind who would not allow it to settle on the ice for a moment's rest.
When the penguin chicks are hatched, the Skuas prey upon these in a most cruel manner, and should a chick wander away from the protecting old birds, a Skua is almost certain to pounce upon and kill it.
In order to find out how many eggs a Skua would lay, I marked some nests, and took the eggs as they were laid.
The instinct of the thief is most strongly marked in the Skua tribe, and I am afraid that the mere love of thieving alone actuates them on many occasions.
Fortunately the Emperor chick escapes the depredation of the Skua gull, which plays such havoc in the Adelie rookeries, because the Skuadoes not come south until the summer, by which time the Emperor chicks are well grown.
For instance, when I was skinning a seal one day near Cape Evans I left a pair of field-glasses lying on a coat close by, and on looking round saw a Skua in the act of making off with them, holding them by the strap in his beak.
Again, when the crew of an Antarctic ship were engaged in blasting the sea-ice which imprisoned it, a Skua flew off with one of the detonators which had been left on the ice.
To-day about a dozen skua gulls (Megalestris Makormiki) appeared for the first time.
The islands lying to the West and North of Scotland, also parts of the far north of the mainland, are chosen by this Skua for its breeding quarters.
Nidification is carried on by the Skua in companies, in the Shetland Islands only.
It is, for its size, equally daring and rapacious; is also remarkable for its powers of flight; but differs from the Great Skuain being more gregarious.
The Great Skua resorts to its breeding grounds in April, and the eggs are laid in May.
The note of this Skua is described either as a plaintive mee or kyow, and when in chase of a bird it has been likened to the syllable yah, oft repeated.
At its breeding-places Richardson's Skua is very demonstrative, and often reveals the situation of the nest by its anxious movements above the intruder's head.
After the young are reared the moors are deserted, and for the remainder of the year this Skua is decidedly pelagic in its habits and haunts.
This Skua appears to pair annually, and the nest, always made upon the ground, is merely a hollow, carelessly lined with a little dry herbage, and sometimes nothing but a shallow cavity in the moss.
The eggs of this Skua are two in number, and vary from pale buff to dark olive-brown in ground colour, sparingly spotted and speckled with dark brown and grayish-brown.
Richardson's Skua reaches its breeding-grounds in the British Islands early in May.
Richardson's Skua is for the most part a summer migrant to the British Islands, and numbers of birds pass along our coasts in spring to their northern breeding-grounds.
Richardson's Skua is a more gregarious species than its larger relative, but its habits generally are much the same.
A brown skua (Lestris antarctica) appeared on the scene now and then, creating consternation among the smaller petrels.
The first saddle-back joining them, they presently succeeded in pulling the skua down.
But in that same instant the long beak of the skua caught it by the head.
But revenge for his recent discomfiture was not the only or the chief reason for this raid of the pirate skua over the domain of the citizen puffins.
They saw two other skuas sailing down from the cliff-top, as if to demand their business in skua territory.
At this moment the great skuawho had robbed the puffin of its fish came in sight of his nest.
As the skua skimmed along, just ahead of him came a puffin, volleying upward from the sea with a particularly fine fish in his beak.
More nimble than he, the skua evaded the blow, and caught him by the neck.
Before he could turn to another egg, the skua had fallen upon him, hurling him clear of the nest, and tearing at him with desperate beak.
For all his hat tricks--and I have certainly felt mine move as he flicked it--this great skua seems to me a rather uninteresting bird, so far as he can be studied on land.
But say that the skua has forgotten this, then it is likely that a certain number of the persecuted birds have by practice discovered that it has, and so emancipated themselves from the tyranny.
I never remember to have seen the great skua bathing; but then there is no special pool in his territory, and partly for reasons given, and also because of the hilly and bumpy character of the ground, it is difficult to watch him.
These competitions between skua and tern, both of them birds of such swift and graceful flight, are very interesting to watch.
The puffin, though hotly pursued, was a little in front, and such was his speed that it seemed doubtful if the skua would overtake him.
On other occasions I have seen the skua fly off as soon as he had missed his swoop, and I have once seen a herring-gull following the chase, with a view, as seemed obvious, to such a contingency.
When I put it down it ran away lustily, yet in a slow and heavy fashion, as though a great skua through all.
Moreover, their contour when flying overhead is peculiar, for the long legs are carried out beyond the tail and have somewhat the effect of long middle tail feathers not unlike those of the Arctic skua or jaeger.
Then all at once a Buffon's skua came overhead, flying low in the squally wind.
At first I took it to be a kittiwake, but soon discovered it rather resembled the skua by its swift flight, sharp wings, and pointed tail.
A row of tiny pin points of light stretched the entire length of the starboard side of the flight deck, and at the stern end was a lone Blackburn Skua fighter-dive bomber with its prop slowly ticking over.
They slashed up toward the zooming Skua with all guns blazing.
As though a thousand glue-covered fingers had touched the bottom of the plane, the Skua stuck to the water.
Five minutes later the Bristol-powered Blackburn Skua was an inferno of flame and black smoke that towered high up into the brassy desert sky.
He could even feel the concussion of the explosion slap against the Blackburn Skua like a soggy wet blanket, and try to whip it over on its back.
The zoom maneuver completely threw the Henschel pilots off guard, and as the Skua rocketed upward Freddy swung his guns around and raked one of the Henschels from prop to tail.
They were real pilots, right to the core, and as soon as Group Captain Spencer had dismissed them they had gone below decks to the repair station to have a look at the Skua that had been hoisted aboard.
The altimeter now showed fifteen thousand feet of air under the wings, and the Skua was still going up like a skyrocket, keeping perfect pace with the two other planes of its section.
Dave simply held the Skua in its thundering power dive and let Freddy Farmer do the rest.
You've got to hand it to them," Dave muttered somewhat reluctantly as he sent his Skua hurtling downward.
Dave chuckled, and held theSkua in its long climb up over the coastline of Libya.
Dave snapped back over his shoulder, and at the same time wheeled the Skua around in a quick turn.
As Dave spoke the last he eased back the throttle and sent the Skua seaward in a long three quarter throttle power dive.
That's a small break for us, anyway," Dave grunted, and hauled the Skua up and around in a prop clawing climbing turn.
And so Dave kept his eyes fixed on that officer with the yellow flags and brought the Blackburn Skua down closer and closer to the Victory's polished flight deck.
His usual diet is fish, except in sealing times; and of the fish he catches the marauding skua never fails to get his share.
But up and down along the shore the skua (Stercorarius crepidatus) chased incessantly, and every now and again we were startled by a pitiful cry of distress above our heads; it was a kittiwake pursued by a skua.
The above list will hopefully give you a few useful examples demonstrating the appropriate usage of "skua" in a variety of sentences. We hope that you will now be able to make sentences using this word.
