PELICAN ISLAND 205 
would indicate a high mortality among the young 
birds; and, indeed, no less than 94 dead young were 
counted. Most of these, however, were birds which 
were old enough to leave the nest, and death was 
doubtless due to the thoughtlessness of tourist vis- 
itors, who chase the young about until they fall 
from exhaustion, or are driven too far to find their 
way home. 
Estimating the number of young birds which 
had left the 594 deserted nests at 891—which would 
be an average of one and a half birds to the nest— 
and adding two parent birds to each nest, we have 
2,581 birds on wing and on foot. But this number is 
to be increased by the 152 young that were still in 
their nests, making the probable total population of 
Pelican Island 2,736. This calculation, however, 
does not take into account the eggs, from which 
almost hourly came new inhabitants of the island; 
and it is with these eggs, or rather with the nest in 
which they are placed, that we may begin a brief 
outline of the young Pelican’s development. 
The Pelican, although a low type of bird, is 
altricial, the young, unlike the offspring of Gulls, 
Ducks, or Snipe, being hatched in a helpless condi- 
tion. The nest, therefore, is not only an incubator 
where with heat from the parent bird the eggs are 
hatched, but it is a cradle for the young. Conse- 
quently, Pelicans’ nests are unusually complicated 
structures as compared with the dwellings of other 
birds equally low in the evolutionary scale. 
There was a very interesting and constant rela- 
tion between the character of the nest and its site, 
ground nests being composed largely or entirely of 
