The condor 
| Vor,. VII 
1 66 
ants receive with little, if any apparent injury. Their bodies seem to be built 
rubber-boned and rubber-jointed with a base-ball skin to stand such battering. It 
is not so with the young gulls. A fall half the distance seems to kill them in- 
stantly. The morning after the young cormorant dropped so unceremoniously 
among our dishes, I found two lifeless gulls on the ledge a short piece below our 
camp; they had undoubtedly dropped from some of the nests not more than thirty 
or forty feet above. 
When we pitched our camp below the two murre rookeries, we knew they 
would squawk all day long, but we had no idea but that they would go to sleep 
when it got dark. We crawled in at nine o’clock that night to get some sleep. 
Just as we got well under way, two murres lit at the landing point of the rookery 
just over my head. Many of these birds had a habit of coming home late. In- 
stead of moving on, the two got into some kind of an altercation on the spot. They 
wouldn’t fight it out like a pair of good tom-cats, but for a good lively discussion, 
it outdid anything I have ever heard in a back-yard. I have slept in the midst of 
a heron rookery and never awoke amid the continuous clacking of the night 
herons. You can do it if there is a sort of regularity in the monotony of the chirps. 
But this was out of all proportion. I yelled and shooed for five minutes, but was 
not heard. I reached under my blanket, raked out a rock, crawled over and 
hurled it at the serenaders. The murres left, but they bore no grudge against me. 
Before I got covered up, they were back again and started in from the beginning. 
We simply had to wait till the quarrel ran its course. No matter what time we 
got to sleep, we were always roused at four in the morning and had to crawl out 
with the bird population and get breakfast. Every morning about that time, the 
murres would drop off the rock in squads and swim off southward to their fishing 
grounds. 
The peculiar top-shape of the murre’s egg is a unique device to prevent it 
from rolling. The practical value of this can be seen every day on the sloping 
ledges. We tried several experiments with these eggs and found they were of 
such taper, that not one rolled over the edge. When they were started down 
grade, they did not roll straight, but swung around like a top and came to a stand- 
still four or five inches down. The eggs were tough shelled and a sharp push 
only sent one about nine inches before it whirled around on its own vertical axis. 
A young murre seems to hatch with a little more vigor than an ordinary chick; 
he has to have strength in order to kick himself out of such a tough shell. When 
he first sees daylight, he is uniformly dusky in color, but he rapidly takes on a 
white shirt-front. When he is half grown, the white extends to the throat and 
the sides of the head. The old birds, on the contrary, have no white whatever on 
the throat and head. 
On land, the murres are about as awkward as anything that ever grew a pair 
of wings. They have to flap and waddle along, bumping here and there, till they 
get a good start, before they can clear the ground. It is amusing to watch one 
sweep in from the fishing ground and land on the rock. When about twenty feet 
away, he begins to slack speed, then he spreads his legs and back-paddles, as awk- 
ward as a man, who has just slipped on a banana peel, and he strikes sprawled 
out in much the same shape that the man does. 
Late one afternoon, we were sitting in camp with our feet dangling over the 
edge of the back porch, when our attention was caught by a gull that sailed out 
from the side of the rock about a hundred feet up. In his mouth, he held a scream- 
ing young murre. High above the rock-reef, he let him drop. Instead of the 
