What is "skuas"

Usage examples of "skuas".

They had increased in number quite remarkably these last days - skuas, whalebirds, albatrosses and petrels of different kinds, sheathbills, terns - and he had noticed that they appeared to be travelling to or from some fixed point to the north.

Aside from the fact that both men's necks had been broken, their heads wrenched almost backward, and their eyes gouged out (although that was probably the birds, the skuas, which had found the bodies before he did), Collins didn't know what had happened.

There were a trio of skuas roosting on the column, but they flapped off as we approached.

Overhead, a small flock of skuas, a half-dozen or so, circled, crying.

I did not see Frigga sink under the water, a crowd of skuas descending onto it as she did, flapping and crying: that was what the ship captain claimed to have seen.

She stood for a while and watched: they were skuas, out hunting over dark streaks of open water.

No other course, during the passage - always north to south - of three skuas and that revolting carrion-eater the crested caracara.

The lemmings were hunted ruthlessly, not just by the skuas, but by snowy owls, gulls, and buzzards, and even Arctic foxes and polar bears.

Sanderling and bunting searched for seeds in the snow, ducks dived through narrow leads in the thin ice, and skuas stood expectantly on prominent rocks.

Stephen was perfectly aware that these creatures too lived by incessant carnage, that the skuas wreaked perpetual havoc among eggs and chicks of every kind, that the sea-leopards ate anything warm-blooded they could catch, and that none of the birds showed the smallest mercy to a fish.

At his feet a minute dull black petrel scrambled awkwardly among the tussocks, and at head-height the piratical skuas planed, glaring from side to side for an unguarded prey.

I climbed Halmarsness, and there, with nesting skuas swooping angrily about my head, I got a better view.