"In the evolution of life on earth there has been a gradual separation of forms descended from common ancestors, and it is convenient to indicate degree of separation by some system of categories, necessarily arbitrary, such as orders, families, genera, and species. These categories, however, do not exist in nature ; they are the invention of man."
"One respect in which the Kittiwake differs from the Larus gull is that it is, presumably, hardly more associated with man than the Storm Petrel, and less than the Fulmar, since it has not come to depend for its food on man's harvesting of the sea. It is not a bird of the edge between land and water, not a scavenger, not (according to the literature) a frequenter of man's ports and harbors. It was therefore with surprise that, on July 17th, 1968, I found flocks of Kittiwakes scavenging alongside the Herring Gulls about the docks in the harbor of Aberdeen. Amid the activity of clanging machinery they circled about, dipping down between boats and barges to pluck prizes from the surface of the foul swirling waters. So delicate a bird in a setting so human, and so alien to it !"
The Storm Petrel and the owl of Athena, III, Louis J. Halle
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