The third occupation of the people is bird catching. This is followed by a restricted portion of the population. The great cliffs of Faroe, ranking with the finest in the world, are the homes of myriads of sea birds. Bird catching is an art as well as an occupation and has descended from father to son through many generations. The skua, puffin, guillemot and eider duck are among the more numerous birds. They are taken for their flesh, oil and feathers. Many of the birds are captured in nets similar to a butterfly net, except that the net is flat and spread between two forks at the end of a long pole. I measured one of these nets and found the handle to be eighteen feet long and each of the Y-shaped prongs was six feet. Between the arms of the Y is stretched the net. In use the fowler sits upon a rock and when he sees a puffin flying directly towards him he elevates the net, the bird is clumsy, unable to quickly change his direction and flying into the net becomes entangled. I sat by one of the fowlers in Iceland one day who was working with one of these nets and in thirty minutes he secured forty birds. Often times the record of two or more a minute is made, when the birds are flying well. The puffin burrows in the ground like a rabbit and there rears its young. During the day they haunt the sea, collect small fish and then fly in great companies in long files to their nests. The fowler is also an expert cragsman and whether he creeps along the narrow shelf hundreds of feet above the sea and works his way from point to point on the overhanging cliffs, or is suspended like a pendulum on a rope four to five hundred feet, he is cool, collected, skillful, and always successful. In fact he is the best cragsman in the world. There are a few domestic arts that have reached perfection, as far as their purpose is concerned, such as spinning, weaving, fulling, embroidering, boat-building and metal decorating. The Faroeman is an expert at wood and bone carving and at metal inlaying. My Faroese sheath knife, made by Peter Arge, is a model of skillful construction, deftly inlaid with the mother of pearl and silver. The sheath is of ebony, inlaid with silver in the form of a whale boat, harpoon and fish hooks.