The Northern Black Swift 
is not strange that birdmen in general failed to share the discoverer’s 
enthusiasm over the find. 
From this time forth Vrooman resolved to find another egg and 
“show ’em.” Each year at the appointed season, therefore, he beat up 
and down that bristling, wind-swept coast. The birds were close sitters 
and well hidden, he knew that, so he examined the rock walls, peered into 
booming caverns, or searched laboriously across the faces of storm- 
scarred stretches. At the end of a dangling rope ladder he fought with 
the spray for a glimpse of coveted recesses. Depths that he could not 
follow with the eye were sounded with a “devil’s rattle-box” of his 
special contriving. All in vain. Mile after mile of likely-looking cover 
was laboriously scrutinized, but nothing came of it, not so much as the 
flash of a vanishing wing. It seemed to the lonesome seeker that he 
must have been dreaming that strange day on the Cormorant cliff. 
Perhaps the scoffers were right, after all, and he had only stumbled on 
the egg of an erring Petrel overtaken on shore. But the Swifts were 
in the country, that he knew. Not many, to be sure, two or three or 
half a dozen at a time, at most. Often he saw them at nightfall playing 
mad games of tag, with only the horizon for bounds. Now a sable lover 
made soft proposal to a dusky mate, the while they scudded across the 
heavens like twin 
meteors. She for 
answer appointed a tryst 
in the shadow of Te- 
hipite’s dome, or over 
a glacier on Shasta’s 
flanks. They might as 
well have gone to the 
dark side of the moon 
for aught the watcher 
learned. The bird had, 
apparently, no local at¬ 
tachments. 
But on a day, the 
9th of July, 1905, it was, 
the long search was re¬ 
warded. The wonder- 
bird was run to earth 
again. On a dank cliff 
and a natural bracket of 
mud, which fairly mim¬ 
icked the first nesting 
978 
