BIRD NOTES AFIELD 



dunes is wet and bends before the wind. The beach sand is 

 wet and sodden, and the moist clouds hurry overhead. The 

 beach is strewn with brown, oozing strands of kelp, with 

 ribbons, whip-lashes and bladdery floats, all torn from their 

 ocean bed by the might of the storm. Jelly-fish, limp and 

 white, lie on the sand, and broken shells — all testifying to the 

 power of the tempest. 



Here and there amid the kelp, or sometimes along the open 

 beach at the line of high tide, lie the bodies of the birds which 

 have been overcome by the elements. I fancy I can hear their 

 wild cries in the night, almost lost in the tumult of the gale, as 

 the great white ghosts of waves leap up and drag them under. 

 Even the albatross has not been spared, for here he lies, his 

 plumage wet and bedraggled, and his immense pinions half 

 buried in the sand — the king of sea birds, the master of the 

 air! See his huge, brown back, his breast of gray, mottled 

 with brown, his feet of livid gray, and his large, tube-nosed 

 beak of a pinkish flesh-color, tipped with blue. A day ago 

 his broad wings were swinging him down into the cold, quiv- 

 ering hollows, between the towering wave crests, and he was 

 reveling in the tumult of the storm. To-day he is but a clod 

 for the life-saving patrolman to kick as he passes along the 

 beach. 



Hurrying on, with numb hands and ears stinging from the 

 cold wind, our attention is presently arrested by the body of 

 another dead bird. At first sight it might well be mistaken 

 for a gull with a broken beak, for it has the web-feet, the gull's 

 blue-gray back, and the white breast. Hie bill, however, is 

 not broken, but curiously indented, with two tubes for the 

 nostrils upon the top, like a double-barreled shotgun. It is 



[30] 



