218 ALASKA INDUSTRIES. 



which fifteen or twenty of tliese birds were resting absorbed in trne 

 admiration of the brilliant gloss and glittering sheen of their feathers. 

 Their coats really scintillate when in the sunlight with a confused 

 blending of rich brownish and deep purple reflections, as though 

 clothed in steel armor beautifully damascened. 



24. Diomedea brachyura. Short-tailed Albatross. 



This bird was the only real suggestion which arose to my mind 

 during my sojourn on the Pribilofs of the past epoch of noted activity 

 in the whale fisheries of the North Pacific and the Arctic, for as I first 

 discerned the large bulk and spread of the albatross i^rior to shooting 

 the natives clapped their hands and said, "You should have been 

 here twenty years ago, when, instead of this solitary example, you 

 would have seen thousands." They came with the whalers, and dis- 

 appeared, as they had done; but, as if prompted by legends among 

 their kind, now and then an adventurous one comes north again and 

 looks in vain for its whale food, or the skinned carcasses rather, 

 turned adrift by the whalemen. They were in sight of the island con- 

 stantly, year in and year out, during that period of great whaling 

 industry. The bird just cited, and this one only, was a solitary 

 example of its kind observed by me. Two hundred miles to the 

 southward, however, it is quite frequent about the Aleutian Islands. 



26. Fulmarus glacialis. Rodger's Fulmar; "Lupus." 



This is the only representative of the Procellarinm I have seen on 

 or about the Pribilof Islands. It repairs to the cliffs, especially on 

 the south and east shores of St. George ; comes very early in the season, 

 and selects some rocky shelf, secure from all enemies save man, 

 where, making no nest whatever, but squatting on the rock itself, it 

 la,ys a single, large, white, oblong-oval egg, and immediately com- 

 mences the duty and the labor of incubation. It is of all the water- 

 fowl the most devoted to its charge, for it will not be scared from the 

 egg by any demonstration that may be made in the way of throwing 

 rocks or yelling, and it will even die as it sits rather than take flight, 

 as I have frequently witnessed. The fulmar lays about the 1st to the 

 5th of June. The egg is very palatable, fully equal to that of our 

 domestic duck; indeed, it is somewhat like it. The natives prize 

 them highly, and hence they undertake at St. George to gather their 

 eggs by a method and a suspension supremely hazardous, as they 

 lower themselves over cliffs five to seven hundred feet above the 

 water. The sensation experienced by myself when dangled over these 

 precipices attached to a slight thong of rawhide, with the surf boiling 

 and churning three or four hundred feet below and loose rocks rat- 

 tling down from above, any one of which was sufficient to destroy life 

 should it have struck me, is not a sensation to be expressed adequately 

 by language; and, after having passed through the ordeal, I came to 

 the surface perfectly satisfied with what I had called the improvi- 

 dence of the Aleuts. They have quite sufficient excuse in my mind 

 to be content with as few fulmar eggs as possible.^ The "Lupus," 



' On the head at Tolstoi Mees, St. George, the natives pointed out to me a basaltic 

 egg shelf which marked the death of one of their townsmen. It occurred in the 

 following singular manner: He, the victim, had been very successful in securing a 

 large basket of the iirst eggs of the season, and, desiring to continue the day's 

 work, dispatched his wife back to the village with the oological burden, so that 

 the basket might be emptied. Meanwhile, in her absence, he put liis little tether- 

 ing stake down anew, and, tying the rope of walrus or sea lion hide to it, dropped 



