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 i26 THE CONDOR [ VOL. VII tographer approached her nest, she would dart at him. She swooped at his head with a loud bark, something like a watch-dog; at six or eight feet distant, she dropped her legs and took him a sharp clip with her feet. Twice she knocked the hat from the intruder's head. We tried several times to get her picture but were only partially successful. It was not a highly pleasing experiment to try on the edge of a ledge that broke so abruptly off. I have often seen the western gull act in ways that speak well for his sagac- ity. On several occasions. I watched him open clams and mussels at the seashore. His bill is unfitted for crushing the hard shell. I saw one gull grasp a clam in his bill, rise to a height of thirty feet and drop it to the hard sand and gravel below. He followed it up closely, but it didn't break. He repeated the same performance over fifteen times before he was successful. Our camp was partly protected from above by the over-hanging rock, which we thought would be fortunate in case of a storm. As we discovered later, this ledge was rather a dangerous protection, because disintegration was constantly going on. The movements of the birds on the cliff above often dislodged pieces of the basaltic structure. When we were in the midst of a meal, or sitting enjoying GULLS IN I=LIGHT a few minutes of rest, we were often startled by an avalanche of pebbles. Drop- ping everything, we would jump for the safer retreats under the ledge, until the rain of stones, often as large as a good sized egg, had ceased. The roof of the rock is covered from one to three feet with a loose coating of friable earth, composed of rotten rock and the guano of countless generations of seafowl. From this sprouts a luxuriant growth of grass and weeds; rich patches of chick-weed, clover, and other varieties. The whole surface is so perforated with the burrows of puffins and petrels, that one cannot walk any distance without sinking into a nest. The tufted puffins dig in from two to four feet, and a bur- row will often have two or three openings. The petrel most always uses the door of a puffin's nest and digs himself a kind of side bedroom off the main corridor. It is not unusual to find one or two puffins along the main hall-way and a couple of petrels lodged in the attic, as it were. The tufted puffin always impresses me as being more of a beast than a bird. Its huge, strikingly-colored bill, long, yellow curls and roll-shaped body give it the queer appearance. One look at that bill shows that according to Lamarck's