Mother Carey’s 
Chickens. 
THE BIRD WORLD. 
(124) 
Mother Carey’s Chickens. 
Their Nesting Place. 
By DONALD MACDONALD. 
No birds are better known to 
sea voyagers than “ Mother Carey’s 
Chickens,” the graceful, tender little 
ocean sprites that once were supposed 
to bring sailors the news of an approach¬ 
ing storm. They are rarely seen near 
land—generally far out at sea, their long 
legs, scarcely thicker than a knitting 
needle, hanging down as they fly, the 
delicately webbed feet just touching the 
crests of the waves, so that, although 
particularly light of wing, they seem to 
be tripping over the billows as they fly. 
It is a strange circumstance that birds 
which haunt the outer ocean, and are 
rarely if ever seen in Port Philip Bay 
in daylight, have their nesting rookeries 
right in the centre of the bay on Mud 
Island. Like the Sooty Petrel, better 
known as the Mutton Bird—which comes 
in such vast flocks to Philip Island— 
they nest in short burrows, and have 
used the higher ridges of Mud Island as 
their rookery, probably for centuries. 
Undisturbed by the fact that the low, 
flat island is no longer exclusively their 
own, the habit established during many 
generations is so strong that they come 
back to it year after year. 
I was one of a party of bird lovers 
who spent Saturday night and part of 
Sunday on Mud Island, to see the last 
of the Petrels for this season. They 
prepare the burrows for nesting early in 
November, and early in March the latest 
of the young birds will have gone. 
Mud Island is in one sense well 
named, for, though some of its beaches 
are literally paved with shells—among 
them the shells of a huge oyster re¬ 
sembling the Port Lincoln, and now ex¬ 
tinct—the side lying next to Queercliff 
is a mud flat, covered with sea grass, 
though which one sinks to the knees in 
slime. A yacht cannot get nearer than 
within a quarter of a mile of the island 
*The “ Melbourne Argus.” 
on that side, and a flat-bottomed boat 
is the best means of landing, although 
the island is much larger than it looks 
when seen from the deck of a steamer 
either in the south or west channel, the 
centre is low and flat. It was once a 
sandy lagoon, such as are seen in the 
.coral atols of the Pacifies, but has silted 
up into a mud flat, submerged at high 
tide. 
Feeding Their Young . 
One of the objects of the excursion 
was to see the Stormy Petrels coming in 
at night to. feed their young. In this 
we were favoured, for the night was 
calm and bright, and it was pleasant to 
lie out on the rookery ridges, which are 
thickly grown over with saltbush, sam¬ 
phire, ice-plant, and the white coast 
currants, which at this time of the year, 
when their fruit is ripening, attract so 
many land birds. The Stormy Petrels 
are rather more cautious than their 
cousins the Sooty Petrels, which begin 
to come in from the sea almost before 
the after-glow has quite deepened to 
dark; but Mother Carey’s Chickens will 
not come to roost until after dark, and 
as a general rule the first bird makes its 
appearance about a quarter past nine 
o’clock. It was within a few minutes 
of that hour when the first Stormy Petrel 
came to the rookeries on Saturday night. 
They differ from the Mutton Birds in 
one other respect. Both come silently 
and swiftly in from the sea, moved by 
a common impulse—eagerness to feed 
their young. But the moment the 
Stormy Petrels reach their burrows they 
burst into a cackling sound, some notes 
of which resemble those of the laughing 
jackass; and when thousands of birds 
are thus greeting their mates or their 
young, and the whole earth underfoot 
seems to be laughing, quaking, and 
hooting demoniacally, the effect is weird 
in the extreme. 
