250 OFF ST. MARY ISLAND — CORMORANTS. 



keeper, who, being a French gentleman, however, understood very 

 httle EngKsh. There is here also a fog gun, fired every half hour 

 in foggy weather. That, with the five minute steam whistle at 

 Point Amour, near by, renders it quite lively here at times, and 

 furnishes much amusement to the natives, especially those, who, 

 coming from a distance, hear these things for the first time. 



Monday the 23rd. At last we have a breeze, and hoisting full sail 

 we are soon sliding through the water at the rate of about six miles 

 an hour. By night we are far on our way to the westward. 



Tuesday the 24th. Though the wind has slackened a Httle it still 

 holds good. The air about us is perfection itself, so clear and 

 bracing is it. At eight o'clock we were just off the St. Mary Islands, 

 having gone about eighty miles in twelve hours, and, counting the 

 curvature of the coast, a full hundred and sixty in the last twenty- 

 four ; and yet on we go, — dashing through the water. We pass 

 Shag rocks, a long row of bare rocks, without vegetation of any 

 kind, where the cormorants, or shags as they are here called, breed 

 in large numbers upon the ledges of bare rock ; they use their 

 own guano deposits for a nest. There are two species of cormo- 

 rants here, the common cormorant {Graculus carbo), and the 

 double crested cormorant ( G. dilophus) ; both are called shags, 

 but the latter are generally designated by the Indian name which 

 is, if I am informed correctly, Wapitougan. Both species breed 

 equally abundant apparently. I have seen thousands at a time 

 lining the rocks. They sit upright, in rows, upon the edges of the 

 rocks, and seldom one sits behind another, so that, to accommodate 

 them, every edge of each crag presents a trimming of cormorants ; 

 a lively looking trimming just as some shot is fired that sends' all 

 into the air. The eggs are two to three, and, though really bluish 

 white in color, are invariably covered with a calcareous deposit 

 that renders them exceedingly chalk-like in appearance. 



At a distance these rocks present the appearance of being cov- 

 ered with snow, but a nearer approach shows that this is a covering 

 of guano from the continual droppings of the birds ; while the tops 

 of the rocks are thickly embedded with an accumulation of guano 



