- 45 - 
The patrol colonies* though during the day apparently uninhabited 
at dude were the soene of great activity* As the sun sans shoawatsrs 
;j 
appeared swung about ia-laa^ taws; at dusK they were joined by white- 
breasted petrels that quartered in swifter courses until when it was really 
daric the air was filled with these nocturnal creatures that during the day 
had remained hidden in their burrows. Shearwaters almost brushed my face 
with their wings and as the petrels passed 1 caught the faint ausjcy odor 
that clings persistently to their feathers* ; 
^NTlmagine a small hit of sand in the midst of a groat oooan* with 
strange sea birds circling about* attracted by the boms of light from a 
strong eleotrio toroh* or pursuing one another with snarling cries, heed¬ 
less of our presence, ’.i/hat scene oouLd be more strange or more alluring? 
-*mong other creatures we found here multitudes of rat3* about one- 
fourth the size of our gray rat and related to the native Hawaiian rat, 
formerly so abundant that it was hunted by Hawaiian prinoes with the bow 
and arrow but now extinct except for a little colony on Popoia Island* 
0 -^ OCOA'*- 
off the north shore of Oahu. These rats, long-tailed, brownr-haired, 
A 
heedless creatures, appeared at dusk in swarms so that by morning the 
sand was laood with their tracks. 'They belong to a group whose forms are 
widely soattered in the Pacific, and may have been distributed from island 
to island as stowaways in the great sailing oanoes of the Polynesians, even 
to suoh remote points as Ooean Island. Their spread by this means is as 
logical as the known spread of the gray rat by moans of the sailing ships 
of the Cauoasian. 
