Xov., I'Uo 
THK BIRDS (^F SAN MARTIN ISLAND 
2(W 
here in order to be through with their family duties by “cormorant season”, as we 
found very few small young. Whenever we went anywhere about the island a 
large band of these white pirates followed us. They were very tame and would 
swoop down to destroy eggs and eat young before our very faces. 
I was disgusted, once, in seeing a gull carry a struggling young cormorant off 
by the neck. The youngster weighed about half a pound, but the g”'! swallowed 
him whole in mid-air. The last 1 saw of the gull, the cormorant was still kicking, 
in the gull’s throat. 
Another gull dew down near us and leisurely gobbled up a brood of four 
young cormorants. The rest of the youngsters showed no fear at the fate of 
their brothers and sisters but sat quietly and awaited their turn. 1 ]:)laced a 
camera, with a string attached to the shutter, on a rock near a nest of young 
cormorants, hoping to get a picture of a gull eating the young, but 1 was dis- 
appointed, as the old cormorant returned first. 
Laras heermanni. Heermann Gull. 
Several seen about the island. 
Phalacrocorax auritus albociliatus. 
Farallon Cormorant. Present in vast _ 
numbers. About 99 per cent of the 
bird j)opulation was made up of this 
and the following- species. The Far- 
allon Cormorant nested farther in- 
land than the Brandt. Following are 
a few of our estimates as to the num- 
ber of birds present, and the amount 
of fish consumed each day by this 
colony. 
The island is a mile and a half in 
diameter. The area is, then, 1.76 
square miles. The breeding area only 
reaches inland a half mile on all sides; 
therefore there is a circle in the center, Ij 
half a mile in diameter, which containsi 
very few nests. The area of this circle|j^ 
is .19 square miles. Subtract this from Fig. 6 , 3 . Young Cauifornia Brown Peui- 
1.76 and we have 1.57 square miles, or cans, on San IMartin Island, Lower 
the area covered by colonies. Call it California. 
1.50 sq. mi., roughly. There are 27,878,400 sf|uare feet in a scjuare mile, so that the 
breeding district contains, approximately, an area of 34,848,000 square feet. Tn 
many little hollows, where the limits of a colony were bounded by rocks, we couin- 
ed the nests and then measured the area enclosed. We then measured, roughly, the 
area between that colony and the next, and so on until we got several colonies. 
We then took the number of square feet over which we had traveled and divided 
it by the number of nests seen and Ave found it to average about one nest to every 
TOO square feet. There were several thousand Brandt Cormorants, which had 
left their nests and were standing around in droves. These we did not include 
in our estimate, as they were impossible to count. 
Allowing, then, one nest to every 100 square feet, we would have 348,480 
nests included in the inhabited area. Each nest represented, on an average, three 
young and two adults. We found two young sometimes, but also found manv 
more nests with four young. Allowing three young and two adults to each nest. 
