182 A CRUISE IN THE LACCADIVE SEA 



glad to state that their touching confidence in us was 

 not misplaced, for it soon appeared that these poor 

 birds already had ills enough to bear, without flying 

 to others that they knew not of. 



On landing we found every foot of the ground 

 above high-water mark literally carpeted with young 

 terns of two species, many living and nearly full- 

 fledged, many dead and rotting, and many reduced 

 to clean-picked skeletons with only the quill-feathers 

 still sticking to the wing-bones. There were no 

 traces of nests, nor of any materials out of which 

 nests could have been made, so that the parent birds 

 must have laid and hatched their eggs on the bare 

 sand. We soon discovered that one great cause of 

 the wholesale destruction of young birds was the 

 voracity of swarms of large hermit-crabs {Coenobita)^ 

 for again and again we found recently-killed birds in 

 all the beauty of their first speckled plumage being 

 torn to pieces by a writhing pack of these ghastly 

 crustaceans. There were plenty of large Ocypode 

 crabs too (O. ceratophthahnus) aiding in the carnage. 



Moseley, in his Notes of a NaHiralist on the 

 " Challenger,'' made mention of a Grapsus crab that he 

 saw on St Paul's Rocks carrying off a newly-hatched 

 tern, but such an accident does not shock one's feel- 

 ings nearly so much as does the thought of full-grown 

 young birds, nearly ready to fly out into the world 

 and to exercise their intelligence, being overpowered 



