THE TUFTED PUFFIN. 905 
the subterminal uncination of the upper mandible, and marks invariably, 
but not conspicuously, a greater length of the member. 
A forty-five degree slope of soil is the characteristic nesting site of the 
Puffin.. Here tunnels are driven at random to a depth of three or four feet, 
and so close together that once, on Erin, by placing a foot in the entrance of a 
burrow and fetching a compass, I was able to touch with the hands the 
entrances of twenty-five others, apparently occupied. ‘This may have been an 
unusually populous section, but reckoning at half that rate, an acre of ground 
would carry 2700 burrows. Hard or rocky soil is not shunned in prosperous 
Taken on Carroll Islet. Photo by the Author. 
A NEST IN THE SALAL BRUSH. 
colonies, but many efforts here are baffled outright and “prospects’’ are at least 
as numerous as occupied burrows. Elsewhere the top soil on precipitous, cling- 
ing ledges may be utilized, or else crannies, crevices, and rock-hewn chambers 
In skirting a patch of salal brush, which grows almost down to the edge 
of the cliff on the south side of Carroll Islet, we were interested to discover 
that the Puffins had runways thru the brush from the barren edge, and that 
they were depositing their eggs in grass- and leaf-lined hollows upon the 
surface of the ground. The distance traversed by one of these runways 
varied from three to ten feet and we noted eight eggs in such situations. 
