Page:Condor7(5).djvu/12

 Sept., I9o5 [ AMONG THE SEA BIRDS OFF THE OREGON COAST, PART I x27 theory, this bird has done nothing since creation but sit around on the rocks and bite open mussels. 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 in-shore rocks and kept with us for two weeks, soon became domesticated. They were fearful gluttons; they would eat till their crop bulged out as big as their bodies and they couldn't waddle. Then they would sleep off the effects of the meal and soon call 1or more in a peeping whistle. One afternoon, I hauled one of the little brats out of a hole hanging to my finger. We lay on the grass on the edge of the cliff, played with him for an hour and doubled up in laughter at the way he would fight. He would jump clear off his feet for a chance to bite your finger. If he caught it, he would hang lik a parrot; if he missed, he went with such energy, that he turned a complete somer- sault before he landed in the soft grass below. Time and time again, he would hurl himself at the challenging finger and go rolling like a ball down the steep incline unable to stop. The instant you assisted him to his feet, he was ready to fight anything that approached within six inches of his nose. I guess my first experience with the old puffins prejudiced me. I wanted a puffin's egg, so I dropped on the ground, thrust in my arm to take one, but was somewhat taken in myself. The odds are always against your getting the egg, if there is an old setting puffin-hen in the hole. I thought at first I had run my hand into a beaver trap, and I couldn't get loose till I had dug the beast out and pried her jaws open. She had cut through the flesh of my little finger to the bone. Wemight have lived on the rock for a month and climbed over it every day and not known a petrel was there, if we had not found their hiding places. They were never seen flying about the rock in the day time. By digging in the soft earth, it was no trouble to unearth theirsmall white eggs. We found that one of the parents, either the male or female, stayed in the burrow every day. The petrel nestling is fed during the day by the parent thrusting the beak down its mouth and injecting him with a yellowish fluid. The old birds seem to be expert at this, for if you take one out ot the burrow he will immediately "play Jonah" in your direction with surprising power of projection. A dose of rancid fish oil suddenly shot up your sleeve is not pleasing either to your nerves at the time, or to your nostrils afterward. If you drop him, he will generally crawl back into his dark hole, or flit off swallow-like and disappear toward the open sea. I'll never forget the evening we made the dangerous trip clear to the top of the rock in the dusk and hid there on the north slope. At the last gleam of day- light, the petrels swept in upon the island like a swarm of bats. Those in the burrows came chittering out to meet them. The ground beneath seemed full of. squeakings and the air of soft twitterings and whistlings, until it felt uncanny. We frequently felt the breath of swift wings, but it was all like a phantasy, for not a bird could be seen, not even a shadow. How in the world a petrel could find his own home and his mate in a whole acre of nesting holes, hidden all about in the grass and in the darkness of the night, is more than I could understand. (To be concluded.)