THE DOUBLE-CRESTED CORMORANT. 
5 
as it is not well known to the people about Gaspe. While the 
inhabited trees are evidently being killed by the deposits of fresh 
guano that copiously whitewash their leaves, trunks, branches, 
and the surrounding ground, many of them still retain enough 
vitality to put forth a few sickly leaves, and but few of them have 
been dead long enough to be rotten and brittle, a condition which 
occurs very shortly after the death of trees of this species. 
Though this colony is composed of about sixty adults there are 
probably twice as many juvenile and non-breeding birds at- 
tached to it and I estimate the total population of this rookery 
at approximately 180 birds. 
Nearly opposite Three-runs and across the bay is a con- 
siderably larger rookery on a part of the broken cliffs locally 
known as Gull bay. Here the nesting is directly upon the broken 
ledges which rise some 120 feet from the sea. The nests are 
scattered about the rock face at various altitudes. Some nests 
are quite close to the bottom, others are just below the crest. 
They are on open shelves, behind jutting spurs, and in fractures 
in the face. The number was difficult to estimate, but from the 
birds visible, I should judge there were about three times as 
many here as at Three-runs, making about 540 individuals in 
all. 
There is at least one other cormorant rookery reported in 
the vicinity, located around the point of Cape Gaspe and near 
Cape Rosier, but we did not visit it. 
Though it had been reported that the Perc6 rock birds fre- 
quented Gaspe harbour and the salmon river mouths emptying 
into it, we saw no supporting evidence of it. Though we made 
the trip by water between Perce and Gaspe three times at various 
hours of the afternoon and early evening when the birds were 
flying homewards, we saw no cormorants between Cape St. 
Peter and Perce rock and observed very few within Gaspe bay to 
seaward of the before mentioned nesting sites — Three-runs and 
Gull bay. Whether the cormorants that are said to nest near 
Cape Rosier visit the harbour waters and their tributaries we 
cannot say ; we saw no evidence of it. There is a break in the 
hills through which such birds might come and go, but we had 
little opportunity to observe fly lines through it, and from the 
