Page:Narrative of a Visit to the Australian Colonies.djvu/127

1832.] and like the majority of them, it is low. Its circumference may be about three miles, and most of its surface is covered with thick grass, which is knee-deep, and with nettles, sow-thistles, and tree-mallows, breast high, or with spreading barilla-bushes of three feet. There are also upon it Yellow Everlastings, which attain to a large size. This luxuriance of vegetation is attributable to the accumulation of the dung of the Mutton-birds, which is mixed with the light soil that is perforated in every direction by their burrows.

Where the barilla affords sufficient shelter, these birds do not seem to consider it necessary to form holes, but they deposit their single eggs under the bushes, in hollows on the bare ground. Perhaps no bird, except the American Migratory Pigeon, is to be met with in flocks equal in magnitude to those of the Mutton-bird; and the latter, like the former, lays only a single egg. The Mutton-birds, or Sooty Petrels, are about the size of the Wood Pigeon of England; they are of a dark colour, and are called "Yola" by the natives. These birds are often to be seen ranging over the surface of the Southern Ocean, far from land: they visit several of the islands in Bass's Straits, in the latter part of the 9th month, when they scratch out their holes: they leave again in the beginning of the 11th month, and return to lay near the end of the same. Each burrow is occupied by a single pair: their egg is as large as that of a duck, and is incubated in about a month. They leave the islands with their young early in 5th month. During the period of their resort to land, they become the prey of men and of hawks, of crows and other ravenous birds, and of black-snakes.

But notwithstanding the wholesale carnage committed among the Mutton-birds, their number is not perceptibly lessened. The greatest quantities are destroyed for the sake of their feathers; two tons and a half of which are said to have been sent from this part of the straits in a season: these would be the produce of 112,000 birds, twenty yielding one pound of feathers. From the great length of their wings, these birds cannot rise from a level surface. The sealers take advantage of this, and enclose certain portions of the islands at night, with converging lines of