MODERN CLIFF-DWELLERS 



many of them breed, and likewise on various spruce- 

 grown islands of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. 



Though I have not visited their haunts at the 

 nesting season, I nevertheless had the pleasure of a 

 close inspection of a Raven's nest on an uninhabited 

 island of Penobscot Bay. About the middle of 

 May, when the Herring Gulls were laying their 

 first eggs on this island, a party of boys discovered a 

 Ravens' nest in a spruce tree, containing three well- 

 grown young. These they carried home with 

 them, and were keeping them, when I arrived a 

 month later, in a hen-house, as they had tried to 

 escape to the woods. One day the boys took me 

 to the nest. The spruces on the island are not 

 large, and the nest, though two-thirds way up, was 

 only about twenty feet from the ground. Climbing 

 to it, I found it to resemble the Crows' nests seen 

 on the island, only it was much larger. It was 

 built of large crooked sticks, some of them as thick 

 as one's thumb, hollowed deeply. The lining was 

 of grass and sheep's wool, of which latter there was 

 an ample supply from the flock that had been 

 ferried over and left to run at large. The well- 

 picked carcasses that lay here and there suggested 

 the well-known carnivorous habits of the Raven. 



As for the Black Guillemots, on many a rocky 

 islet there is a small colony of them, of from two 

 or three pairs up to thirty or more. To one such, 

 near Matinicus, I have often been. It is a low- 

 lying strip, a couple of hundred yards long and 

 rather narrow, composed almost wholly of round 

 stones and boulders heaped together in wild confu- 

 sion. Sometimes I have rowed there in a fog, by 



87 



