166 NEW YORK ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



merge into one another at certain portions, but, on the whole, are 

 fairly distinct. The seven miles of beach on Cobb Island, which 

 faces the ocean, is a long stretch of breakers booming upon a 

 beach of yellow sand. At certain spots windrows of oyster-shells 

 are piled many feet high, and pebbles and shells cover the upper 

 portions. Beyond the reach of ordinary tides the curving mounds 

 of the sand-dunes are seen, covered with a scanty growth of coarse 

 grass, mingled with clumps of maritime goldenrod. 



Farther inland these dunes rise higher, and are composed part- 

 ly of earth. Here the grass grows rank and close, and bayberry 

 and "kings" bushes appear. This zone, in the northern portion of 

 the island, continues to the western side, to the edge of the brack- 

 ish high tides, where it is succeeded by a zone of tall reeds and 

 marsh-grass. Farther out on the mud-flats eel-grass appears, 

 around whose stems hordes of minnows and crabs abound, and 

 where occasional diamond-backed terrapin may be picked up. 

 From this point, especially at the north end of the island, the tide 

 leaves bare a wide expanse of flats, dotted with hollows where 

 the deadly sting-rays hide. Now and then the great side fins of 

 one of these uncanny creatures may be seen undulating through 

 the shallows. 



Such is a brief sketch of Cobb Island, a few acres of pebbles 

 and marsh and dunes, which, except for the Life-Saving Station 

 near one end, is as primeval as the day the eye of man first beheld 

 it. Utterly useless for human purposes, it is the home of hun- 

 dreds of beautiful beings, who fly around us in clouds begging 

 for the safety of their young and eggs, not an individual among 

 them who would not risk its very life to shield its nest from harm. 

 Last year a terrible danger threatened the birds and their young, 

 in the shape of cats which were turned loose on the island. But 

 old Nature came to the rescue of her children, and every feline 

 perished in the first high tides of October. When we learn that 

 twenty-eight hundred birds have been slaughtered in three days 

 on Cobb Island for millinery purposes, we may well blush at 

 having to acknowledge that there exist such brutes in human 

 guise. The least we can do is to guarantee protection to the sur- 

 vivors and their eggs from now on. 



To do this intelligently we must know the ways and habits of 

 the birds. So here on the dunes of Cobb Island we pitch our 

 tents ; we patrol the beach watching the birds in calm and storm ; 

 we pry into their life at midnight, with only the faint ray of a 

 bull's-eye lantern and the roar of the surf to guide us ; we photo- 

 graph them and their eggs and young; we discover their food 



