F'UFFINOS. 



365 



the morning they left for the Cape. Two others who had journeyed from Moriae near Geelonf;, 

 were taking back thirty dozen ef,'gs, principally the result of only one collecting. I did not meet 

 with any of the "thirty dozen a day" professional eggers; all were amateurs. One however, 

 informed me he had been collecting regularly every season for thirty-live years, and on the two 

 previous days drew forth with his crook two eggs from a burrow together. As he explained, 

 possibly other burrows had contained two eggs, but on securing one he was satisfied and never 

 thought of ol)taining another. Cape Woolomai should be proclaimed a bird sanctuary and 

 Piiffinus iciiitii'osli'is be protected for absolutely a long term of years. Protection has already 

 been given to one of the smaller colonies between Ived-cliff Point and the Nobby's. 



Only one instance, of what we thought at the time to be an act of cruelty, came under our 

 notice. Mr. Vivian Gabriel informed me he had seen, a short distance away on the colony, an 

 injured Mutton-bird. (_)n returning with him I found the bird squatting on the sand with the 

 neck laid bare and the skin and feathers lying loose from the base of the skull to the upper part 

 of the body, and looked as if it had received a downward stroke from some sharp instrument. 

 As the bird was in a dying condition, I quickly terminated its misery. Subsequently, after my 



return to Sydney, Mr. Joseph 

 Gabriel wrote me: — "Theinjured 

 Mutton-bird which you picked 

 up on Murray's rookery, I 

 believe met its death by flying 

 against a barbed wire fence. 

 Vou remember its neck was torn 

 longitudinally. My reason for 

 believing so is this. One of my 

 friends, Mr. J. R. Walton, of 

 Rhyll, was on Cape Woolomai 

 on the 28th November, about 3 

 a.m., looking for eggs on top, 

 with the aid of a lantern. Never 

 in all his experience had he seen 

 the birds so thick ; they were 

 frequently flying against the 

 lantern and himself, and were running about his feet like rats ; he was afraid of treading on 

 them. When daylight appeared he found seven birds impaled on a barbed wire fence. Our 

 newspapers have had several accounts of cruelty practised on Mutton-birds at Cape Woolomai, 

 but I think they err on the side of exaggeration." 



The following notes were made by E'r. Lonsdale Holden, while resident at Circular Head, 

 on the north-west coast of Tasmania: — "On the 20th February, 1887, I witnessed what was 

 apparently a migration of Short-tailed Petrels or " Mutton-birds" (Nain's hrcvicaiidus) from their 

 breeding-places. They were flying eastward in a steady stream some miles long, at the rate of 

 about fifteen to twenty miles an hour. They came across the neck of Circular Head peninsula 

 from the westward, down the Eastern Inlet into Circular Head Bay, where they circled about 

 over the water like a swarm of Swifts 'hawking," and then they consistantly streamed off to sea, 

 flying close to the surface of the water. I watched this stream of birds for a quarter of an hour 

 till they had all passed, but do not know how long they had been passing before I noticed them. 

 Computing the thickness of the stream, I should estimate that every ten yards of it in length 

 contained thirty birds. Taking the length of the stream to be five miles, the number that 

 passed by would be, by calculation, 26,400. They i\y not unlike Swallows, sailing without 

 wing stroke for long distances, and inclming their bodies by altering the axis of their wing-planes, 



92 



SHORT-TAILl'D I'KTKKL. 



