130 BIRD STUDIES WITH A CAMERA 
may be applied to many of the rocky islets of the 
gulf, in the latter it relates exclusively to the Bird 
Rocks at the northeastern end of the Magdalen 
group. 
Percé Rock, Bonaventure Island, the Magdalens, 
and the Bird Rocks themselves seemed to offer the 
best opportunities to the bird photographer, and, 
accompanied by my best assistant, I departed for the 
first named on July 2, 1898. 
Percé Rock” (so named because its base has been 
pierced by the action of the waves) lies about three 
hundred feet off the land at the town of Percé, on 
the west side of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. 
A semiweekly steamer from Dalhousie, near the 
head of Bay of Chaleur, furnishes the regular means 
of communication with Percé, and the town at once 
possesses a distinction over any place on the line of 
arailway. For, aside from every other reason, there 
is a pervasiveness about the smoke of a railway 
locomotive which contaminates the atmosphere and 
robs local influences of half their potency. Doubt- 
less there are persons who would be glad to change 
the aroma of Percé’s fishyards for the stifling air of 
a railway tunnel, but give me the pungent odor of 
Percé’s drying cod unadulterated. 
Even the steamer does not touch Percé, and we 
were landed by a boat in a sea just rough enough to 
make the experience interesting. At the pier no 
hotel agent greeted us, for Percé possesses neither 
hotel nor boarding house, and summer resorters are 
almost unknown. This was a delightful discovery. 
We had come in search of an isolated colony of 
birds, and we found also an isolated colony of man 
