120 EAMBLES OF A NATUEALIST. [Ch. VHI. 



birds, black above and white beneath, face white, beak and 

 feet black, and tail forked. There were vast numbers of 

 them, and it would have been easy to have taken with the 

 hand as many as one wished. On rising, they formed a 

 thick canopy immediately overhead, darting at our hats, and 

 almost at our faces ; so that we were under the necessity of 

 holding up sticks and waving them over our heads to keep 

 them off while we stooped to pick up some eggs. All this 

 while they made various noises, chattering, croaking, and 

 barking like a dog. 



The nests of these birds were mere depressions in the 

 ground upon the hill-side ; but some of them chose the rocks, 

 or crept into little clefts which were only just large enough 

 to admit them. A great many of them had eggs, but I 

 nowhere found more than one egg in a nest. These eggs 

 were very variously marked, sometimes brown, speckled with 

 greenish, in colour hke that of a magpie ; sometimes uni- 

 formly speckled with small brownish spots upon a white 

 ground ; while others again had larger blotches about the 

 big end. They appeared to have been systematically taken 

 from them, and many of the birds were sitting upon a small 

 rough piece of rock. 



Besides the wideawakes, there was a large number of birds 

 of another species,- somewhat larger in size and of a blue- 

 grey and white colour, and these formed the large patches 

 seen upon the hill-side ; but they were wilder than the terns, 

 and all flew off on our approach. These birds had also eggs, 

 of a larger size than those of the terns, and blotched with 

 reddish-black on a white ground. 



Besides these there was a small sooty petrel, and a few 

 gannets (Sula alba) ; and the only bird I observed upon the 

 island which was not aquatic was a tree-sparrow (Passer 



