84 BULLETIN 107, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM. 
paroquet, crested, and least auklets, where they made poor attempts 
at nests of straw and feathers. The grassy uplands were entirely 
occupied by glaucous and glaucous-winged gulls, but a large open 
space of bare ground was so honeycombed with burrows of tufted 
puffins that we could hardly walk without breaking into them. The 
entrances to occupied holes were decorated with gull feathers and 
with the broken shells of murres’ eggs; the nests at the ends of the 
shallow burrows were rudely made of gulls’ feathers and dry grasses. 
Very few puffins were seen, as they were busy incubating on their 
single eggs, but if we dug them out, they went scrambling off toward 
the water, bounding over the ground in their frantic efforts to fly. 
Mr. William Palmer (1899) mentions a nest, found on this island 
“on August 7, which contained a slightly incubated egg. This nest 
was placed between bowlders, open to the sky, and was made of sea- 
weeds and seaferns. It was quite large, about 15 inches in diameter, 
scanty in material, and practically bare in the center.” 
The nesting habits of this puffin in the great bird reservations on 
the coast of Washington have been well described by Messrs. William 
Leon Dawson and Lynds Jones. The largest colony on this coast seems 
to be on Carroll Islet where in 1907 Mr. Dawson (1908) estimated 
that there were 10,000 tufted puffins nesting. In 1905 Mr. Dawson 
estimated the puffins on this island at 5,000, showing a decided in- 
crease in two years under protection. This island is a “high, rounded 
mass of sandstone, tree crowned, and with sides chiefly precipitous. 
The crest is covered also with a dense growth of elderberry, salmon 
berry, or salal bush, while the upper slopes are covered with lux- 
uriant grasses.” Professor Jones (1908) says of the nesting of the 
tufted puffin here: 
The only places where this species was not present and nesting were the 
rock precipices and the forested area, except, of course, the ledges, which were 
wholly occupied by murres and cormorants. Even the fringe of dense brush 
contained many nests. It is well known that the typical nesting habit of these 
birds is to find or make a burrow, usually among the rocks. The most of such 
burrows observed seemed to have been cleared of débris by the birds and some 
of them had clearly been made by the birds without much, if any, natural 
cavity, to mark the beginning. An occasional burrow was so shallow that the 
bird or egg could be seen but most of them extended a number of feet into the 
ground. In walking over a turf-covered, steep slope one needed to be careful 
not to break through these burrows and take a headlong tumble. In climbing 
such a steep slope the mouths of the burrows afford a comfortable foothold. 
In descending such a slope rapidly you are more than likely to have the leg 
bearing the most strain bumped just behind the knee by a frightened bird as 
it rushes headlong from its nest. One of our pleasant surprises with these 
birds was the finding of some nests beneath the thickly matted salal bushes, 
but without the semblance of a burrow. Clearly the birds considered the 
bushes a sufficient protection from marauding enemies, and were content to 
simply arrange their nest material upon the ground. 
