Sept., 1905 | AMONG THE SEA BIRDS OFF THE OREGON COAST, PART I 
127 
theory, this bird has done nothing since creation but sit around on the rocks and 
bite open mussels. 
Some of the puffin nestlings we found in the burrows were as interesting as 
their parents were vicious. Two of the jet-black, fuzzy youngsters, we had taken 
on the in-shore rocks and kept with us for two weeks, soon became domesticated. 
They were fearful gluttons; they would eat till their crops bulged out as big as 
their bodies and they couldn’t waddle. Then they would sleep off the effects of 
the meal and soon call for more in a peeping whistle. 
One afternoon, I hauled one of the little brats out of a hole hanging to my 
finger. We lay on the grass on the edge of the cliff, played with him for an hour 
and doubled up in laughter at the way he would fight. He would jump clear off 
his feet for a chance to bite your finger. If he caught it, he would hang like a 
parrot; if he missed, he went with such energy, that he turned a complete somer- 
sault before he landed in the soft grass below. Time and time again, he would 
hurl himself at the challenging finger and go rolling like a ball down the steep 
incline unable to stop. The instant you assisted him to his feet, he was ready to 
fight anything that approached within six inches of his nose. 
I guess my first experience with the old puffins prejudiced me. I wanted a 
puffin’s egg, so I dropped on the ground, thrust in my arm to take one, but was 
somewhat taken in myself. The odds are always against your getting the egg, if 
there is an old setting puffin-hen in the hole. I thought at first I had run my 
hand into a beaver trap, and 1 couldn’t get loose till I had dug the beast out and 
pried her jaws open. She had cut through the flesh of my little finger to the bone. 
We might have lived on the rock for a month and climbed over it every day 
and not known a petrel was there, if we had not found their hiding places. They 
were never seen flying about the rock in the day time. By digging in the soft 
earth, it was no trouble to unearth their small white eggs. We found that one of 
the parents, either the male or female, stayed in the burrow every day. 
The petrel nestling is fed during the day by the parent thrusting the beak 
down its mouth and injecting him with a yellowish fluid. The old birds seem to 
be expert at this, for if you take one out of the burrow he will immediately “play 
Jonah’’ in your direction with surprising power of projection. A dose of rancid 
fish oil suddenly shot up your sleeve is not pleasing either to your nerves at the 
time, or to your nostrils afterward. If you drop him, he will generally crawl back 
into his dark hole, or flit off swallow-like and disappear toward the open sea. 
I’ll never forget the evening we made the dangerous trip clear to the top of 
the rock in the dusk and hid there on the north slope. At the last gleam of day- 
light, the petrels swept in upon the island like a swarm of bats. Those in the 
burrows came chittering out to meet them. The ground beneath seemed full of 
squeakings and the air of soft twitterings and whistlings, until it felt uncanny. We 
frequently felt the breath of swift wings, but it was all like a phantasy, for not a 
bird could be seen, not even a shadow. How in the world a petrel could find his 
own home and his mate in a whole acre of nesting holes, hidden all about in the 
grass and in the darkness of the night, is more than I could understand. 
(To be concluded.) 
