Penobscot Bay, Maine.
1896. 
July 16 
(No 6)
island about two hours or until nearly 10 P.M. 
  Nor were our ears more favored than our eyes for as 
night closed in we heard only the chirping and bickering
calls of Savanna Sparrows, the musical peat-weet of 
Spotted Sandpipers, the various cries of the Sea Gulls, 
and the sullen boom of the surf on the outer ledges. 
Altogether it was a great disappointment and one that 
I am quite at a loss to explain. Unquestionably there 
were two or three hundred Petrels' nests scattered about 
under the turf within two hundred yards or less of where 
we sat. If any birds left or came to them while we were 
there it must have been after dark and they must
have skimmed so close to the ground as to usually escape 
our observation. Even then it seems incredible that we 
should not have seen some of them as they came up 
from the sea on the crest of the ridge. The utter 
silence of so large a colony of breeding birds was also 
remarkable. Either the fishermen must have deceived 
us or the clamor of which they have told us is 
produced only at certain periods of the bending season 
or during certain conditions of weather. It is idle, 
however, to speculate on finer points or to do more 
than record as above the fact that during this 
visit we neither saw nor heard anything[.]
  In a lobster pot on the beach we found a row, a young 
bird but fully fledged & able to fly well as he proud 
when we liberated him. Conary tells us that young
Crows often enter baited pots drawn up on the shore 
and, like lobsters, are unable to get out again. 
We rowed & drifted homework with the tide reaching the
Emersons' at about midnight.