182 Union Bay 



egg tipped and swayed, but the others remained as motion- 

 less and inanimate as if they had been made of china. 



I photographed the action. In the hatching I had wit- 

 nessed a couple of years before, the egg had been ring- 

 checked and the process of emergence required more than 

 ten minutes because the young bird had difficulty in free- 

 ing itself from its cell. This hatching was a thing of speed 

 and precision, for in less than five minutes after the first pro- 

 jection of the bill the last convulsive struggle ended and the 

 throbbing bird lay beside the two halves of the container. 

 It had come from a shell about an inch and three-quarters 

 long. It would have taken an engineer to figure how it could 

 have been stored in so small a space. 



This bird was not helpless and naked like the young tree 

 swallows I had discovered the week before in an old piling. 

 This infant was precocial, that is to say, it was born fully 

 clothed in down and capable of leaving the nest. Its feet 

 were huge for so small a creature and must have taken up a 

 considerable part of the egg space. Its body was completely 

 covered with black and white down, and its large bill was 

 tipped with an £gg tooth, a shell-breaking tool discarded 

 soon after birth. 



The newcomer lay motionless for a few minutes, paying no 

 attention to the camera when it was near, or to me when I 

 lifted it carefully and changed its position a trifle. The sun 

 shone upon wet and badly disarranged down. The infant was 

 not dainty in appearance like a young chicken. The strange 

 quarter-inch stripes, the tousled appearance of the head, and 

 its huge feet and bill gave it a tough appearance not usually 

 associated with an infant of any kind. As young as it was, it 

 displayed strength and energy, and proved it by struggling 

 over the rounded top of the nest and down its sloping sides 

 to the water. 



"Don't tell me," said the girl, "that it's bath time already." 



It wasn't bath time. The bird paused at the water's edge 



