EIGHTH ANNUAL REPORT. 165 



complaining cry comes from the darkness around the boat — a sub- 

 dued yeh! — yeh! yeh! — yeh! and our guide tells us that a pair 

 of flood-gulls are passing — following the flood-tide and feeding 

 as they go. 



Another weird nocturnal scene is vouchsafed us before the pro- 

 saic light of day lessens the mystery, but not the interest of the 

 vague sounds and shapes of this first night. We escape the storm 

 by sleeping in the great launching room of the station, with the 

 wonderful self-righting and self-bailing surf-boats on either hand. 

 About midnight the bright moonlight pours through the wide 

 double doors and awakens us, and going out we find that a won- 

 derful change has taken place. Perfect calm has succeeded the 

 storm, and the great yellow moon, occasionally dimmed with 

 fleecy clouds, makes the vast stretches of marsh only more black, 

 with here and there a silvered bit of water. The slack tide ripples 

 against the reeds, and from everywhere, back in the marsh, along 

 the water, and even from under the station itself, comes a most 

 weird and bewildering chorus — the subdued chuck! chuck! of 

 invisible clapper rails. 



Cobb Island is a link in the chain of outlying islands which 

 threads our coast from New Jersey south to the Carolinas. It is 

 about twenty miles north of Cape Charles, opposite Cheriton Sta- 

 tion on the New York, Philadelphia and Norfolk Railroad. This 

 island was at one time a fashionable summer resort of Virginians, 

 and as early as the civil war had one or more large hotels and 

 several private dwellings. The former owner of the island, a 

 man named Cobb, accumulated a small fortune by making salt 

 from sea-water, and being proprietor of this summer resort. In 

 those days the island was about fifteen miles long and three or 

 four miles wide, and was at a safe elevation above sea-level. 

 Some ten years ago currents of the ocean began to undermine 

 the island, and now it is uninhabited, its hotels and dwellings hav- 

 ing been washed away. Reduced to about one-half its former size,. 

 Cobb Island is still one of the principal breeding-grounds of the 

 sea-birds of our middle Atlantic coast. The trust which the 

 white-winged creatures placed in old Ocean, depending on her for 

 daily food, and rearing their young almost within reach of her 

 waves, was not misplaced. With a rush and a swirl she toppled 

 over the structures of the human intruders, drove them in terror 

 from the island, and left but shifting sand-dunes, safe only for 

 the sea-swallows and their kin whose cries had echoed the roar of 

 the surf so many years before their human enemies appeared. 



The island may be divided longitudinally into six zones, which: 



