Nov., 1905 | 
161 
Among the Sea Birds off the Oregon Coast, Part II 
BY WILLIAM LOVELL FINLEY 
PHOTOGRAPHS BY HERMAN T. EOHLMAN a 
T HE novelty of the situation had a great deal to do with alleviating the hard- 
ships and the difficulties we had to encounter in living five days among the 
sea birds on the vertical side of that rock isle. We had brought two ten- 
gallon casks of fresh water with 11s. We reasoned thus: if we were sea-bound 
on the rock by storm and had enough water to drink, we would not starve to 
death. According to the species of birds on the island, we made six different kinds 
of omelet. When the eggs were all hatched, if necessity compelled, we could dine 
on sea gull checks, even if they were not spiced up in good marketable chicken- 
tamale form. 
The ledges were slippery and the rocks crumbly in many places. We could 
not climb along the shelves an hour without risking our lives in a dozen places. 
While camped on the rock, we wore rubber-soled shoes so we could hang and 
cling to the surface with some degree of safety. But even with these, as we hung 
to the ledges, we often found our toe-nails instinctively trying to drive through 
the soles of our shoes to get a better hold. We started with a new pair, but after 
four days of jumping and climbing on the sharp corners of the granite, we didn’t 
have enough shoe left to tie on our feet, so we had to substitute burlap. 
If it is the longing for adventure in the Anglo-Saxon veins you want to sat- 
isfy, you get it here on the rocks; if the love for Nature, you find her as she is. 
There’s not much poetry on the island. The adoration of many of the nature 
lovers, who fall into ecstacies over the sweet singing of the birds and the lovely 
perfume of the June flowers, would receive an awful blow on the solar-plexus the 
minute they got into the midst of an ear-splitting, screaming, murre rookery, or got 
the faintest sniff of the atmosphere. 
Up and down the ridge of the rock is the great colony of Brandt cormorants, 
the only “shag” found on the outer rock. Their nests are scattered only a few 
feet apart for over a hundred yards. I counted over 400 nests in this one colony. 
They were built up in funeral pyre fashion, a foot or more above the surface, by 
the debris of successive generations — grass and sea-weeds, fish-bones and the dis- 
gorged remains of past banquets. In every nest were four or five eggs of a skim- 
milk, bluish tint, over which it looked as if some amateur white-washer had 
smeared a chalky surface. 
When a young cormorant is hatched, he looks as if some one had covered him 
with a black, greasy kid glove. The little beasts are not very pleasant to look at 
when you see them just coming out of the shell, but the gulls think these young- 
sters are the most palatable thing on the island. A nestful of them never lasts 
more than a few seconds if they are left unguarded. 
When I first looked at the motley crowds of half-grown cormorants, that sat 
about in groups 011 the top of the rock, I thought Nature had surely done her best 
to make something ugly and ridiculous. They stand around with their mandibles 
parted and pant like a lot of dogs after the chase on a hot day. The throat is limp 
and flabby and hangs like an empty sack, shaken at every breath. Their bodies 
are propped up with a pair of legs that have a spread of webbed toes as large as a 
medium pan-cake. The youngsters have no very clear notion of what feet are for, 
at least on land, and when you go near, tiiey go hobbling off like a boy in a sack 
a Photographs illustrating this article are protected by copyright and must not be reproduced without per- 
m ission. 
