surface their elongated tail-feathers, to my surprise, 
drooped supinely "the next thirty y3.rds 
or so, snapping out straight, however, at each beat of 
the ?;ings. After'the bird had flown one hundred yards 
and acquired full headway, the tail invariably assumed 
a horizontal position, streaming out behind most grace- 
fully in an exact line with the body. • 
All of these Tropic Birds which passed sufficiently 
near the steaiaer to enable me to distinguish colors with 
certainty had the bill of a bright coral red . 
Off Sombrero Key I saw upwards of fifty Terns 
with bronw backs and virhite underparts, evidently either 
Sooty or Bridled Terns. They were hovering in an excited 
throng over a spot where some lenge fish were breaking 
and kept plunging down, one after another, in quick 
succession, precisely as our New England Terns hover and 
plunge over a school of blue-fish. 
There Y^ere also a good many small Puff ini, — 
Puffinus auduboni , doubtless — about Sombrero and 
between that island and St. Eustacious. 
Ten or fifteen miles to the northward of 
Sombrero I observed, for the first time, half-s-dozen or 
more Wilson's Petrels following the v/ake of our steamer. 
They kept so closely under the stern that it is possible 
that they may have been \Yith us ever since they first 
