CHAPTER XXXIII 



ORDER OF TUBE-NOSED SWIMMERS 

 OF MID-OCEAN 



TUBINARES 



THESE are indeed strange birds. To a landsman, it re- 

 quires an effort to imagine a series of birds, some of 

 them small and seemingly weak, which prefer to live in the 

 watery solitudes of mid-ocean, indifferent to calms, and defy- 

 ing both tempests and cold. To my mind, there is no sec- 

 tion of the bird world so strange and so awe-inspiring as this. 

 Just how the albatrosses and the petrels ride out the long, 

 fierce gales, and keep from being beaten down to the raging 

 surface of the sea, and drowned, I believe no one can say. 

 It is no wonder that sailors hold the albatross in superstitious 

 reverence, or that Coleridge has immortalized it in the "Rime 

 of the Ancient Mariner." Well may a sailor feel that any 

 large bird which lives only at sea, and follows his ship day after 

 day, is the bird "that makes the breezes blow." 



The members of this small group of mid-ocean birds are 

 distinguished by the curious fact that the nostrils, instead of 

 opening through the side of the upper mandible, near its 

 base, are carried well forward through two round tubes that 

 either lie along the top of the bill or along its sides. By this 



233 



