156 The Wilson Bulletin — No. 97 



their brown breasts. I saw several of these birds high in 

 the air passing- from one to the other a peculiar object, which 

 later proved to be the dead and dried body of a petrel. With 

 little effort they would repeatedly drop one hundred feet or 

 more in a series of mighty swoops and catch the object before 

 it reached the ground. On other occasions, passing close to 

 the surface of the water, after the manner in which they so 

 deftly pick up floating objects, the players would nip at the 

 protruding dorsal-fins of the small sharks that are numerous 

 in the shallow water about Laysan. Frequently I have seen 

 them drink from a small fresh-water pond by scooping up a 

 quantity of water with their long lower mandible as they 

 dexteriously sweep across the surface. This inveterate fond- 

 ness of play led to the partial destruction of our flag, which 

 we were obliged to remove from its place over headquarters 

 to prevent its complete annihilation. On one delightful occa- 

 sion a member of the party was startled by having his white 

 helmet, the pride of his heart, abruptly removed from his head. 

 Looking up he saw it sailing swiftly away in the beak of a 

 man-o'-war. They chase other sea-birds and make them dis- 

 gorge their prey. The gannet especially, being a weak flyer, 

 falls an easy victim to these thieves. I remember one evening 

 observing a gannet that had just returned from fishing, with 

 a crop full of fish, fleeing from one of these birds. At first 

 it seemed as though the gannet would out-fly its pursuer and 

 reach the beach, where it would be more than a match for its 

 enemy ; but its load was too heavy. The man-o'-war over- 

 took the quarry, seized it by the tail, and then suddenly rais- 

 ing itself in the air, turned the gannet completely over. When 

 the gannet, thus rudely overturned, lost control and disgorged 

 the contents of its crop, the man-o'-war plunged and actually 

 caught the fish, even as it came from the gannet's mouth. 



From previous reports it appears that the man-o'-war birds 

 were less abundant on Laysan fonnerly than today, the pres- 

 ent number being estimated at about 12,500. It seemed 

 strange to us that they should increase in numbers when we 

 observed their wholesale slaughter of each other's offspring ; 



