210 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
[Aug. 5, 1911. 
Capt. Edwards, and showed him the paper. 
Capt. Edwards at once recognized it. and con¬ 
firmed the date and other circumstances as 
stated.” 
These birds cannot leave a ship's deck, but 
must have room to run with wings outstretched 
for some distance before they can sustain them¬ 
selves in flight. They always arise in this ludi¬ 
crous fashion from the water and Sir John 
Murray noted on their breeding grounds “sev¬ 
eral run for over two hundred yards with ex¬ 
tended wings before they got fairly off.” 
Albatrosses nest in gigantic colonies on re¬ 
mote islands, especially in the New Zealand re¬ 
gion. The wandering albatross makes a nest 
of “closely packed dry and green grass,” in 
which is laid one egg about five inches long, 
white sparsely speckled with brown. 'Dr. God- 
man in his monumental work on the petrels.§ 
quotes Buckland’s statement that “the nestling 
is fed by the old birds until it becomes so fat 
that it exceeds the parents in weight and then 
the latter leave their young for four months or 
more. During their absence the nestling gets 
no food but subsists entirely on its own fat, 
which statement,” adds Dr. Godman, “if true, is 
probably without a parallel in natural history.” 
Bullen cites a record of a wandering alba¬ 
tross measuring seventeen feet from tip to tip 
and measured one himself with an expanse of 
fourteen feet. Frank Greene, who has measured 
more than one hundred specimens, says the ex¬ 
panse rarely exceeds eleven feet. The two 
which I caught—one of which is here pictured 
from a photograph as we lifted it over the taff- 
rail—measured 10 feet i|4 inches and 10 feet 
5 inches respectively; were 3 feet 9 inches in 
length and weighed just 16 pounds each. 
A11 adult wandering albatross is white, with 
wings and outer tail feathers black. There is 
a large white patch on the wings at the “elbow'’ 
The wandering albatross is a compromise be¬ 
tween the sublime and the ridiculous. It bridges 
the chasm from one extreme to the other. 
Standing on the poop-deck of a great sailing 
ship thirty days away from the nearest sight of 
land watching one of these superlatively grace¬ 
ful birds maneuvering beneath a wild and 
treacherous sky, needs a Coleridge to do justice- 
to the occasion; a crew clamoring to have its 
body stewed in vinegar for supper, is discon¬ 
certing; but to see one of these enormous birds 
blunder into the log line, large as one’s finger 
and white, and come tumbling into the water in 
a series of grotesque somersaults, angular 
bends, open beak, straddling feet and hoarse 
croaks, is ridiculous. 
Pelicans, whether flying down the beach play¬ 
ing “follow the leader” with wing strokes and 
sailing or solemnly meditating on life in a zoo¬ 
logical garden are clowns; but the wandering 
albatross with no effective enemies has little to 
sharpen its wits and with its hump of enormous¬ 
ly developed wing muscles and huge beak, 
formed in a permanent smile, is more of a 
hunch-back jester. 
Deep water sailors enjoy catching albatrosses. 
The body is eaten. The fat is unexcelled for 
greasing sea boots. The beak forms the proper 
handle for a cane made of the shark’s back 
bone. The primary feathers are used for work¬ 
ing grease into the bearing's of pulley-blocks. 
The bones of the wings being hollow, make ex¬ 
cellent pipe stems, while the huge webbed foot 
is skinned out for a tobacco pouch. 
Albatrosses have the same character of 
feathering as a swan, so that the profile is en¬ 
larged some \/ 2 or 2 inches by the thick 
“swan’s down” protected by waterproof 
feathers. The breasts and backs are thus in 
great demand and bring five dollars each to the 
sailor in either San Francisco or Sydney. 
FRENCH DEVICE. 
Method of baiting with fat pork. 
ENGLISH TRIANGLE. NOVA SCOTIA SAIL-NEEDLE HOOK. 
Method of baiting. 
which is, however, somewhat flecked with gray 
as is also the white of the back. Closely related 
in size and appearance are the snowy-winged 
albatross, spotlessly white with the exception of 
the tips of the scapulars and the primaries and 
secondaries, which are black; and the royal al¬ 
batross with markings intermediate between the 
snowy-winged and the wandering albatrosses. 
It is known that it takes several years for 
these albatrosses to attain mature plumage (it 
is variously stated at from five to seven years), 
the wandering albatross first being brown, then 
gray and finally white and black. 
§A Monograph of the Petrels (Order Tubinares); by 
Frederick Du Cane Godman, D. C. L., F. R. S., Presi¬ 
dent of the British Ornithologists’ Union. With hand- 
colored plates by J. G. Keulemans. Witherby & Co., 
London. 1907-1910. (Limited edition of 225 copies.) 
They are used for women’s hats, but more par¬ 
ticularly for women's muffs. 
The deep feathering and extreme lightness of 
the body make an albatross float very lightly 
upon the water. This effect is heightened by 
the enormous protruding “elbows’’ which when 
folded extend above and beyond the tail, the 
feathers producing a roof effect quite typical of 
the back of an albatross. 
The boatswain’s mate of the Daylight had 
been a jackie aboard the U. S. ship Mononga- 
hela when she called at Kergulen’s Island in 
1875 to bring back the American “Transit of 
Venus” parties. In the dogwatch he liked 
nothing better than to sit on the foc's’lhead and 
spin yarns about that great land of the South 
Indian Ocean; where amid nearly constant rain 
or snow and violent gales, lives the. sea ele¬ 
phant. the sheath bill and the.“pisnus Kergulen 
cabbage” that has to be “biled in three w'aters” 
to make it most palatable. Here he and his 
mates gathered albatross eggs and young birds. 
The latter they found quite savory, but the 
white of the eggs became “sort o’ hard and 
grisly” when cooked. 
Surgeon Kidder, U. S. N., the naturalist of 
the American expedition, gives such a graphic, 
account of the nesting of the albatrosses that 
I quote at length :jf 
“None of these birds had shown themselves 
in the neighborhood of our camp until Dec. 17. 
On the 2nd of January, the steam launch of 
the Monongahela carried me several miles down 
the beach to the low strip which connects 
Prince of Wales foreland with the mainland. 
Here I saw very many albatrosses nesting upon 
hillocks, built up some two feet or more from 
the ground. The nests are composed mostly of 
grass, and, being of different heights, seemed 
to have been used again and added to, year after 
year. I counted twenty-three birds in sight, at 
one time, each perched upon its nest. Being 
conspicuous by the whiteness of their plumage, 1 
and rarely very near together, they remind one 
Pf the whitewashed cairns set up by surveyors. 
Driven from the nests and compelled to walk, 
they look not unlike overgrown geese. The 
distribution of their weight compels them to 
stretch out their neck horizontally, and to walk 
with a widely-swaying gait. Two approached 
each other as I was watching them and went 
through with some very odd maneuvers. One 
raised its head and spread out its wings as if 
to embrace the other, which remained with 
wings folded. Both then clattered their bills 
and touched them together, first on one side 
and then on the other. This maneuver was re¬ 
peated several times. 
“They are dull birds, making but little attempt 
to defend their eggs beyond loudly clattering 
their bills. The sound thus produced is louder 
than would be expected, owing to the resonance 
of the considerable cavity included by the 
mandibles. It is very like the sound of a tin 
pan beaten with a stick. I knocked several off 
with my heavy overcoat twisted up like a rope, 
and secured their eggs before they recovered 
sufficiently to approach the nests. They climbed 
onto the empty nests again, however, and sat 
as contentedly to all appearance as before. P 
believe that they do not lay a second time.” 
It seems that nowhere do the colonies of the 
wandering albatross place their nests nearer to 
each other than fifty yards. The colonies are 
located upon the grassy plains of the interior 
tablelands also, and Mr. Moseley records it 
breeding actually within the crater of the 
terminal cone. 7.000 feet above the sea, at Tris¬ 
tan da Cunha. 
The food of the albatross consists of oceanic 
mollusca, squids, small crustaceans, medusae 
and scraps from ships. It is owing to their 
fondness for the latter that so many are caught 
by seamen on becalmed sailing vessels. 
Sketches of three devices are reproduced from 
my journal. The open triangle cut from sheet 
copper or an old tin can and fastened to a 
wooden float, as used on French merchantmen, 
is very efficient. In all the devices it is neces- 
^Bulletin of U. S. National Museum, No. 2, 1875. 
