84 LIFE HISTORIES OF NORTH AMERICAN DIVING BIRDS 



ing under the loose rocks in the center of the island among the 

 paroquet, crested, and least auklets, where they made poor attempts 

 at nests of straw and feathers. The grassy uplands were entirely 

 occupied by glaucous and glaucous-winged gulls, but a large open 

 space of bare ground was so honeycombed with burrows of tufted 

 puffins that we could hardly walk without breaking into them. The 

 entrances to occupied holes were decorated with gull feathers and 

 with the broken shells of murres' eggs; the nests at the ends of the 

 shallow burrows were rudely made of gulls' feathers and dry grasses. 

 Very few puffins were seen, as they were busy incubating on their 

 single eggs, but if we dug them out, they went scrambling off toward 

 the water, bounding over the ground in their frantic efforts to fly. 

 Mr. William Palmer (1899) mentions a nest, found on this island 

 "on August 7, which contained a slightly incubated egg. This nest 

 was placed between bowlders, open to the sky, and was made of sea- 

 weeds and seaferns. It was quite large, about 15 inches in diameter, 

 scanty in material, and practically bare in the center." 



The nesting habits of this puffin in the great bird reservations on 

 the coast of Washington have been well described by Messrs. William 

 Leon Dawson and Lynds Jones. The largest colony on this coast 

 seems to be on Carroll Islet where in 1907 Mr. Dawson (1908) esti- 

 mated that there were 10,000 tufted puffins nesting. In 1905 Mr. 

 Dawson estimated the puffins on this island at 5,000, showing a de- 

 cided increase in two years under protection. This island is a "high, 

 rounded mass of sandstone, tree crowned, and with sides chiefly 

 precipitous. The crest is covered also with a dense growth of elder- 

 berry, salmon berry, or salal bush, while the upper slopes are covered 

 with luxuriant grasses." Professor Jones (1908) says of the nesting 

 of the tufted puffin here: 



The only places where this species was not present and nesting were the 

 rock precipices and the forested area, except, of course, the ledges, which were 

 wholly occupied by murres and cormorants. Even the fringe of dense brush 

 contained many nests. It is well known that the typical nesting habit of these 

 birds is to find or make a burrow, usually among the rocks. The most of such 

 burrows observed seemed to have been cleared of debris by the birds and some 

 of them had clearly been made by the birds without much, if any, natural 

 cavity, to mark the beginning. An occasional burrow was so shallow that the 

 bird or egg could be seen but most of them extended a number of feet into the 

 ground. In walking over a turf-covered, steep slope one needed to be careful 

 not to break through these burrows and take a headlong tumble. In climbing 

 such a steep slope the mouths of the burrows afford a comfortable foothold. 

 In descending such a slope rapidly you are more than likely to have the leg 

 bearing the most strain bumped just behind the knee by a frightened bird as 

 it rushes headlong from its nest. One of our pleasant surprises with these 

 birds was the finding of some nests beneath the thickly matted salal bushes, 

 but without the semblance of a burrow. Clearly the birds considered the 

 bushes a sufficient protection from marauding enemies, and were content to 

 simply arrange their nest material upon the ground. 



