BY A. F. BASSET HULL. 653"- 



supply, and are cooked in various ways, the principal being plain 

 hard-boiled, eaten cold, or made into large omelettes. The 

 albumen when boiled is almost transparent, and of a faint bluish- 

 white, similar to that of the domestic duck's egg, while the yolk 

 is of a deep salmon-pink. They have practically no fishy flavour, 

 and are not so rich as the domestic hen's eggs. I tried them 

 cooked in several ways, and found the cold hard-boiled variety 

 with salad fairly palatable, but on the whole hardly an article of 

 diet to hanker after I The industry of collecting these eggs for 

 food has resulted in the evolution of a local term, viz., " Wide- 

 awakaneggin." 



On the North Ridge breeding-place there were probably not 

 more than two thousand birds established, and the periodical 

 collections of eojgs would total less than 500 at a time. There is 

 every reason to believe that a bird will lay again very soon after 

 being robbed. I have seen the ground cleared of eggs at ten 

 o'clock in the morning, and by three o'clock in the afternoon a 

 hundred more were laid within the same area. I am inclined to 

 think that this frequent laying of eggs by birds which, in the 

 ordinary course of nature would be satisfied to lay and hatch out 

 one egg in the season, is largely the cause of so much variety 

 in the colour-markings and dimensions of the eggs. Those 

 observed by me on the Admiralty Islets, which are rarely visited, 

 were almost uniformly of the normal type, viz., faintly bluish or 

 white ground, with reddish spots, dashes, or freckles distributed 

 fairly evenly over the whole shell. On the day of my visit to 

 those Islets(16th October, 1907) there were many hundreds of 

 thousands of eggs to select from, and it was with difficulty that 

 I could find a couple of dozen sufficiently well or unusually 

 marked to attract notice. The same may be said of the eggs on 

 the higher parts of Phillip Island off Norfolk Island. On the 

 other hand, the eggs taken from the North Ridge, Lord Howe 

 Island, and from Nepean Island and the more easily accessible 

 islets off Norfolk Island, which are raided almost daily during 

 tlie season, exhibit the most extraordinary variation in both, 

 colour and size. Eggs covered with huge carmine blotches and. 



