772 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
[May is, 1909; 
trouble that one’s attention is sure to be attracted. 
All cats have a devilish patience when in pur¬ 
suit of prey, and while some are more expert 
than others, we know that the whole feline race 
have a gift for murder. For every cat living 
in a populous bird neighborhood we may allow 
at least one bird per day during the breeding 
season. As they are always on the watch and 
spend a considerable portion of each day in 
hunting, I do not think that this estimate is 
excessive. 
The question is, do cats make good their 
position in the house or barn by keeping down 
the rats and mice? There is no doubt that a 
few of them render good service in this way, 
although the rodents are pretty safe during the 
breeding season of the birds. Some cats are 
very successful in catching young rabbits and 
squirrels. The ground squirrel or chipmunk 
seems to be an easy prey. They are brought 
in frequently. Can anything be done to limit 
or check this murder of the birds that love to 
be near us? They evidently fancy that the 
neighborhood of a dwelling is the safest place 
to rear their young. I presume that the sug¬ 
gestion of a tax on cats would meet with much 
opposition. Theodore Gordon. 
Philadelphia Zoological Society. 
The thirty-seventh annual report of the board 
of directors of the Philadelphia Zoological So¬ 
ciety was read at the annual meeting of the 
members and loanholders of the society held 
April 22 last. 
The society has met with a severe loss in the 
death of its president, Chas. Platt, who had 
served it in that capacity since April, 1890. His 
place has been taken by Dr. Chas. B. Penrose 
whom many of our readers will remember as 
a big-game hunter of years ago. The report of 
the secretary of the society, A. E. Brown, is as 
interesting this year as it always is. 
Owing to the business depression which pre¬ 
vailed during the past year, there was a con¬ 
siderable falling off in the receipts from ad¬ 
missions. This loss was met by close economy 
and by the postponing for the time all new con¬ 
struction not already provided for and all repair 
work not immediately necessary. The result was 
a very small debit balance at the end of the 
year. The number of specimens exhibited at 
the gardens was 2,526, of which 487 were mam¬ 
mals, 952 birds. 1,012 reptiles and 75 amphibians. 
No less than fifty-seven species new to the col¬ 
lection were secured during the year. Among 
these were a couple of young bears from Alaska, 
believed to be Ursus dalli, the Yakutat bear. 
Among the losses during the year were the huge 
Indian elephant Bolivar, presented to the col¬ 
lection nearly twenty-one years ago by the late 
Adam Forepaugh. His skin is in the collection 
of the Academy of Sciences. The ostrich house 
and the cage for the anthropoid apes in the mon¬ 
key house have been completed. 
A most important work carried on by the so¬ 
ciety is the testing of monkeys and lemurs for 
tuberculosis by means of the tuberculin test. 
During the year 30 monkeys and lemurs have 
been so tested and the result of this work, car¬ 
ried on since March, 1905, has been that not a 
single death has occurred from tuberculosis in 
the exhibition series in the monkey house since 
October, 1907. 
Three Arch Rock Reservaiion. 
IV.—Cormorants—Continued. 
One day we were climbing along the ledges 
with our cameras, when a commotion above 
attracted our attention. A gull was darting 
furiously downward with an angry scream, evi¬ 
dently in battle with some other bird. The 
opponent was too far above to be in sight, but 
at each swoop of the gull we could see they 
were drawing nearer the brink. A moment 
later we saw a half-grown cormorant scramb¬ 
ling and flapping wildly to hold on to the steep 
crumbly surface. At the next swoop the gull 
BRANDT CORMORANTS. 
PREPARING A MEAL ON THE ROCKS. 
clipped him on the neck and the momefitum 
swept him over. The victim was heavier in 
body than the gull, but undeveloped and help¬ 
less on the wing. Down he flopped with a 
rumble and rattle of the shale, bumping on the 
ragged rocks of the different ledges, catching 
for an instant in a niche only to be knocked off 
by his remorseless pursuer. I saw him land a 
hundred feet below in the middle of a crowded 
ledge of murres. There was a commotion in 
that peaceful community—a grunting and 
squawking as a hundred pairs of wings were set 
in motion and the frightened birds swept out 
over the sea. The poor cormorant, battered 
and bruised, was still alive. Before he had 
time to collect his senses, the disturbed murres 
came rushing back. The gull was forced to 
abandon his victim, who had dropped plump 
into a veritable hornets’ nest. The unfortunate 
black youngster was stung right and left, fore 
and aft, by the sharp bill thrusts of the mad 
murres. He ambled out of there with about as 
much vigor as he had landed, and limped to 
the top of a boulder, where he was left in peace? 
We found him still there in the afternoon, too 
sore and scared to move. As he sat there 
blinking and shuddering, it seemed to pene¬ 
trate his inexperienced brain that he had met 
with one of the hardest streaks of luck that 
anything in feathers had struck. Our sym-' 
pathy went out to him and I bundled him" 
under my arm and carried him back to the top 
of the rock, where I laid him down in a nest 
with five more that looked exactly like him. f 
It is a common occurrence for the young 
birds to fall over the cliff, where the population 
is so crowded. Late one afternoon while pre¬ 
paring our usual meal, we were suddenly, 
startled by a small avalanche of loose gravel 
and rubbish rattling down the side of the cliff.' 
We jumped for the cover of the projecting 
ledge just as a large cormorant came flopping 
down and landed in a heap at our doorstep. 
He must have come from one of the nests 
seventy-five feet above us. Such a fall would 
have broken every bone in the body of an 
ordinary creature. The youngster got up a 
little dazed, twisted his neck in a few grotesque 
curves as if he were just waking up, then de¬ 
liberately climbed over the pots and pans to 
the end of our dining table, crept close beside 
our Are, drew in his long neck and went to 
sleep. 
I have been amazed at the fearful falls some 
of the young murres and cormorants take with 
little if any apparent injury. Their bodies 
seem to be rubber-boned and rubber-jointed 
with a baseball skin, to stand such battering. 
It is not so with the sea gulls. A fall half the 
distance seems to kill them instantly. The 
morning after the young cormorant dropped 
so unceremoniously among our dishes, I found 
two lifeless gulls on the ledge below our camp. 
They had undoubtedly dropped from some of 
the nests thirty or forty feet above. 
The Murre—a Creature of the Crowd. 
The roof of the rock is covered from one to 
three feet with a loose coating of soft, friable 
earth. The whole surface is so perforated with 
the burrows of puffins, or sea parrots, and petrels 
that one cannot walk any distance without sink¬ 
ing into a nest. The tufted puffins dig in from 
two to four feet and a burrow will often have 
two or three openings. The petrel sometimes 
uses the door of a puffin’s nest and digs him¬ 
self a kind of a side bedroom off the main cor¬ 
ridor. It is not unusual to find one or two 
puffins along the main hallway and a couple of 
petrels lodged in the attic, as it were. 
The tufted puffin always impressed me as being 
more of a beast than a bird. Its huge, striking- 
colored bill, long yellow curls and roll-shaped 
body give it this queer appearance. One look 
at that bill shows that, according to La March’s 
theory, this bird has done nothing since creation 
but sit around on the rocks and bite open mus¬ 
sels. 
Some of the puffin nestlings we found in the 
burrows were as interesting as their parents 
were vicious. Two of the jet black fuzzy 
youngsters we had taken on the inshore rocks 
and kept with us for two or three weeks soon 
became domesticated. They would eat till they 
could not waddle, then sleep off the effects of 
the meal and soon call for more in a piping 
whistle. 
