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Volume XV Jaiiuary-February, 1913 Number 1 
A GLIMPSE OF SURF-BIRDS 
By WILLIAM LEON DAWSON 
WTTH SIX PHOTOS BY THE AUTHOR 
W HAT we do not know about the Surf-bird {Apliriza z'irgata) would fill 
one of those dummy rows (entitled “The Complete Works of Xanedu’A 
in a Wernicke bookcase. Disguise it as modestly as yon will, if you 
have ever seen one you contrive to let your friends know of it the first day, and 
you fall to wondering the day after whether that Surf-bird story wouldn’t bear 
repeating. Anyhow, I’d had my luck last fall, when three of a fiock of five fell 
before our impulsive guns — better luck than I deserved, for while Howell exult- 
ed (really, you know, he yelled like a Comanche), I sat on the wet sand and hat- 
ed myself for having used a gun instead of the camera — an unpardonable lapse 
into barbarism ! 
But coals of fire were heaped upon my head when on the 3rd of May last I 
thrust it cautiously over the crest of the beach bluff at La Patera, near Santa 
Barbara, California, and saw on a nearby reef, not a mere handful, but a large 
company of mingled shags and Surf-birds. The cormorants rose hurriedly and 
after them the Aphrizids, but the latter settled again while we accomplished a 
long detour which brought us up, panting, behind a line of rocks substantially on 
a level with our prizes. I snapped hurriedly at 150 feet, then set out more care- 
fully to make a series of photographic approaches. First, I crept on hands and 
knees across the upper beach to a jutting rock which offered a little shelter; then 
advanced by slow stages in a direct line. What matter though the sand was wet 
and plastered here and there with blobs of crude oil ! W ere they not Surf-birds ! 
Ever and again I snapped. At the sixty-foot range a jealous wave engulfed me 
as I squatted Turk-fashion upon the sands. No matter. It would not do to put 
the cause to hazard, by rising. “Snap” went the latch, and “roar” went the shut- 
