One of the other members of the auk family that you can find on Skomer Island and surrounding islands is the guillemot. Not quite black and white like many of its cousins (puffins, razorbills, penguins), it is chocolate brown and white. While puffins and razorbills are burrowing birds, guillemots lay their eggs on cliffsides right out in the open. This is apparently the reason why there are so many of them gathered together because they figure there's safety in numbers. It's not so much that the eggs are at risk of falling off the spots where they are laid but that they are exposed to any sort of predatory bird that would steal the eggs, such as the great black-backed gulls, who try to steal eggs from the burrows as well. I wasn't able to get too many good close-up shots of the guillemots, but I have several where you can see what a tightly-knit community they are. Interspersed with them in their nesting and hangout spots are a few razorbills and some gulls or kittiwakes (I couldn't get good enough shots to tell).
Anyway, they are sleek looking birds that remind me a lot of loons, though they are not related. Sorry for the gross white stuff in the photos--their poop on the cliff sides. When there are 25,000 guillemots on the island (about 12,500 breeding pairs) that like to keep close together, it's hard to believe the cliffsides can go unscathed by waste. It's just amazing how close they get, though. They remind me in some ways of seeing bunches of mollusks that stick to the side of rocks at the beach that are sometimes just covering the rocks. It's kind of weird looking, in a way.
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