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Volume XI January- February 1909 Number 1 
NOTES ON ALBATROSSES AND OTHER PELAGIC BIRDS IN 
AUSTRALIAN WATERS 
By DR. T. W. RICHARDS, U. S. NAVY 
T HE body of water known as the “Great Australian Bight”, which fills an 
indentation on the southern coast of the Island Continent twelve hundred 
miles in width, bears an unenviable reputation; here the navigator well 
knows that bitter winds, with rain and hail, and the eternal swell which rolls in 
from the Antarctic, will all combine to render his passage both difficult and un- 
comfortable. It was with no pleasant anticipations, therefore, that we contem- 
plated a trip from Melbourne, Victoria, to Albany, Western Australia; of all 
months, September — the beginning of spring — is one of the worst, and we had 
already sampled the Southern Ocean in crossing from New Zealand. But by the 
ornithological enthusiast, physical discomforts are easily overlooked; so when Mr. 
W. H. D. Le Souef, Director of the Melbourne “Zoo”, informed me that I was 
about to traverse one of the most populous haunts of the albatrosses of Australian 
seas, I brushed up my binoculars and prepared to become intimately acquainted 
with my fellow voyagers. The outcome fully justified my friend’s prediction, for 
in no other waters have I seen such an interesting display of oceanic bird-life. As 
indicating local conditions, it may be mentioned that the weather, too, was all we 
had anticipated; for four days the big battleship “Kansas” ploughed into a gale 
which drove the head seas over our flying bridge, some forty feet in bight. 
The first point of interest upon leaving Melbourne w r as Mud Island, a small, 
round hill, rising from the waters of Port Philip Harbor; for this is one of the 
breeding haunts of the White-faced Petrel ( Pelagodroma marina), a straggler to 
our own shores, and consequently included in the A. O. U. List. Tho we passed 
close to the island, no birds were in sight, but we afterwards encountered them at 
sea. The breeding season is in November and December, and I obtained three 
eggs taken during these months in previous years. Reed and Davie, referring to 
eggs of this species from New Zealand, in the Crandall and Thayer collections, 
describe them as being heavily marked, for petrel eggs, with a “wreath” of spots; 
