i66 THE CONDOR I Von. VII ants receive with little, if any apparent injury. Their bodies seem to be built rubber-boned and rubber-jointed with a base-ball skin to stand such battering. It is not so with the young gulls. A fall half the distance seems to kill them in- stantly. The morning after the young cormorant dropped so unceremoniously among our dishes, I found two lifeless gulls on the ledge a short piece below our camp; they had undoubtedly dropped from some of the nests not more than thirty or forty feet above. When we pitched our camp below the two murre rookeries, we knew they would squawk all day long, but we had no idea but that they would go to sleep when it got dark. We crawled in at nine o'clock that night to get some sleep. Just as we got well under way, two tourres lit at the landing point of the rookery just over my head. Many of these birds had a habit of coming home late. In- stead of moving on, the two got into some kind of an altercation on the spot. They wouldn't fight it out like a pair of good tom-cats, but for a good lively discussion, it outdid anything I have ever heard in a back-yard. I have slept in the midst of a heron rookery and never awoke amid the continuous clacking of the night herons. You can do it if there is a sort of regularity in the.monotony of the chirps. But this was out of all proportion. I yelled and shooed for five minutes, but was not heard. I reached under my blanket, raked out a rock, crawled over and hurled it at the serenaders. The tourres left, but they bore no grudge against me. Before I got covered up, they were back again and started in from the beginning. We simply had to wait till the quarrel ran its course. No matter what time we got to sleep, we were always roused at four in the morning and had to crawl out with the bird population and get breakfast. Every morning about that time, the tourres would drop off the rock in squads and swim off southward to their fishing grounds. The peculiar top-shape of the murre's egg is a unique device to prevent it from rolling. The practical value of this can be seen every day on the sloping ledges. We tried several experiments with these eggs and found they xvere of such taper, that not one rolled over the edge. When they were started down grade, they did not roll straight, but swung around like a top and came to a stand- still four or five inches down. The eggs were tough shelled and'a sharp push only sent one about nine inches before it whirled around on its own vertical axis. A young murre seems to hatch with a little more vigor than an ordinary chick; he has to have strength in order to kick himself out of such a tough shell. When he first sees daylight, he is uniformly dusky in color, but he rapidly takes on a white shirt-front. When he is half grown, the white extends to the throat and the sides of the head. The old birds, on the coulrary, have no white whatever on the throat and head. On land, the tourres are about as awkward as anything that ever grew a pair of wings. They have to flap and waddle along, bumping here and there, till they get a good start, before they can clear the ' ground. It is amusing to watch one sweep in from the fishing ground and land on the rock. When about twenty feet away, he begins to slack speed, then he spreads his legs and back-paddles, as awk- ward as a man, who has just slipped on a banana peel, and he strikes sprawled out in much the same shape that the man does. Late one afternoon, we were sitting in camp with our feet dangling over the edge of the back porch, when our attention was caught by a gull that sailed out from the side of the rock about a hundred feet up. In his mouth, he held a scream- ing young murre. High above the rock-reef, he let him drop. Instead of the
