4 THE AUDUBON BULL EWES 
If you want to learn songs, stick close to Mr. Cadbury. A natural 
musician himself, he has the most amazing ear for music. On one trip we 
stood on the edge of a broad field with the forest beyond it. He urged us 
to listen intently, and name all the birds we heard. I identified seven. 
He called off fifteen! Incidentally, he is a direct descendant of John 
Bartram, the “father of American botany,” and William Bartram, one of 
the nation’s earliest ornithologists. 
The sea trips are especially interesting to Middle-Westerners. When 
the ocean promises to be calm and free of fog, half the camp goes off in 
the two boats, loaded down with binoculars, cameras, raincoats, sun-tan oil, 
and insect repellant. A landing is made on one rocky island to examine 
and photograph the nests of the black guillemots. The island on which 
the Leach’s petrels nest is visited only in a flat calm, for the landing is 
extremely difficult. If you have the good luck to hit the right weather, you 
will see the brooding birds and the nestlings tucked down in their burrows. 
They feed only at night. The absent member of the pair spends the day- 
light hours far out at sea. 
A large cormorant and gull colony nests on Old Hump Ledge. On this 
one ledge alone there were 188 nests last summer, and about 500 breeding 
pair in the entire Bay. In 1931 there were only four known pair in 
Muskongus Bay. We saw the birds in every period of development from 
blind, naked, rubbery-looking creatures that only a mother cormorant could 
admire, to loudly squawking adolescents about to leave the nest. The 
cormorants’ nests are crowded along the top of the ledge. On the lower 
levels are herring and black-backed gull nests. The newly hatched gull 
chicks crawl away from the nest as soon as their feathers have dried, and 
hide in the crevices of the boulders. We had to watch every foot-step lest 
we crush one, for they are the color of the rocks, and difficult to see. We 
even watched two chicks hatching. We could peer into the end of the egg 
and see the egg tooth chipping away at its small prison. Mr. Cadbury 
bands the half-grown young birds on all these trips. The campers helped 
him catch the gulls — awkward, leggy creatures who can run among the 
rocks with surprising agility. Two of the campers were severely bitten 
and had to be patched up by the nurse who accompanies the sea trips. 
Mr. Cruickshank remarked that they had banded many a gull, but that 
was the first time the gulls had banded the campers. Mr. Cadbury has 
had about 250 returns from the gulls he has banded in Muskongus Bay. 
Mest of the returns came from Tampa Bay, Florida, and a few from the 
Gulf coast of Louisiana and Texas. 
On Wreck Island we saw our first northern ravens, and heard their 
unforgettable croak. This is a beautiful island, almost tropical in the 
dense, lichen-draped forest. It is the scene of a charming story for chil- 
dren, “The King of Wreck Island,” by Barbara Cooney. Here we visited 
large rookeries of the great blue and black-crowned night herons. Mr. 
Cruickshank climbed to one nest and lowered a great blue nestling in a 
sack. We kept a safe distance from the outraged youngster, for that 
powerful bill jabs at any gleaming object, and can put out an eye. On 
the same island Mr. Cruckshank climbed up to an osprey nest and lowered 
