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every quarter, and that with a rapidity hardly conceivable. When they congregate together, so 

 dense is the cloud, that night is ushered in full ten minutes before the usual time. The birds 

 continue flitting about the island for nearly an hour, and then settle upon it. The whole island 

 is burrowed ; and when I state that there are not sufficient burrows for one-fourth of the birds to 

 lay in, the scene of noise and confusion that ensues may be imagined ; I will not attempt to 

 describe it. On the morning of the 25th the male birds take their departure, returning again in 



the evening; and so they continue to do until the end of the season Besides Green 



Island the principal rookeries of these birds are situated between Flinders Island and Cape 

 Barren and most of the smaller islands in Furneaux's group. The eggs and cured birds form a 

 great portion of the food of sealers, and, together with the feathers, constitute the principal 



articles of their traffic It takes the feathers of forty of these birds to weigh a pound ; 



consequently sixteen hundred must be sacrificed to make a feather bed of forty pounds weight. 

 Notwithstanding the enormous annual destruction, I did not, during the five years I was in the 

 habit of visiting the Strait, perceive any sensible diminution in their number. The young birds 

 leave the rookeries about the latter end of April, and form one scattered flock in Bass's Strait. I 

 have actually sailed through them from Flinders Island to the heads of the Tamar, a distance of 

 eighty miles. They shortly afterwards separate into dense flocks, and finally leave the coast." 



The following extract from Flinders's Voyage (vol. i. p. 170), describing a single flight of 

 these birds, will give the reader an idea of their prodigious numbers: — "There was a stream 

 from fifty to eighty yards in depth and three hundred yards or more in breadth ; the birds were 

 not scattered, but were flying as compactly as a free movement of their wings seemed to allow ; 

 and during a full hour and a half this stream of Petrels continued to pass without interruption, 

 at a rate little inferior to the swiftness of the Pigeon. On the lowest computation I think the 

 number could not have been less than a hundred millions. Taking the stream to have been fifty 

 yards deep by three hundred in width, and that it moved at the rate of thirty miles an hour, and 

 allowing nine cubic yards of space to each bird, the number would amount to 151,500,000. The 

 burrows required to lodge this quantity of birds would be 75,750,000 ; and allowing a square 

 yard to each burrow, they would cover something more than 18^ geographic square miles of 

 ground." 



Mr. Gould describes the egg as being of snowy whiteness, and measuring 2'75 inches in 

 length by 1-9 in breadth; and he adds: — "The white or albumen forms a very large proportion 

 of its contents ; and it is remarkable that a small part of both the yolk and the white remains 

 soft and watery, however long the egg may be boiled." 



