162 STORIES OF BIRD LIFE 



coast called Yesocking Bay. It was the roosting place not 

 only for the cormorants which fed in the neighborhood, but 

 also for those which mustered from all the region lying 

 between Roanoke Island on the north and Hatteras Inlet 

 on the southeast. About these waters they lived, singly or 

 in flocks, and procured their living by diving and captur- 

 ing their prey from the abundant schools of fish, such 

 as the shad, herring and menhaden, which swarm in the 

 sound. In spring they are supposed to leave for the North, 

 and it has been said by ornithologists that the summer 

 home of the cormorant did not extend to North Carolina. 



A few weeks later we again approached the island as 

 the sun went down, and as no cormorants were seen gath- 

 ering there, we might have been led to suppose that they 

 had all departed for. the North, not to return until the 

 autumn. However, we found it to be otherwise. Sailing 

 down the sound, we could see here and there seated on a 

 channel stake or buoy a great black bird, rearing its head 

 on a long slender neck nearly three feet above its perch. 

 Now and then one would rise from the water and, making- 

 straight for the mainland, would disappear in the forests 

 on the shore. They were especially numerous in the neigh- 

 borhood of Beaufort, where the people from long famili- 

 arity with the birds have named them "Nigger Geese," or 

 "Bogue Sound Lawyers." 



