Appendix III: Nesting Associations.

Audubon’s Journals (Audubon and his Journals, New York, 1898), especially those relating to his life on the coasts of Labrador and the St. Lawrence river in the thirties, contain excellent descriptions of the nesting associations of aquatic birds. Speaking of “The Rock,” one of the Magdalene or Amherst Islands, he wrote: — “At eleven I could distinguish its top plainly from the deck, and thought it covered with snow to the depth of several feet; this appearance existed on every portion of the flat, projecting shelves. “But it was not snow: it was gannets, all calmly seated on their eggs or newly-hatched brood-their heads all turned windwards, almost touching each other, and in regular lines. The air above, for a hundred yards and for some distance round the rock, “was filled with gannets on the wing, as if a heavy fall of snow was directly above us.” Kittiwake gulls and foolish guillemots bred on the same rock (Journals, vol. i. pp. 360–363).

In sight of Anticosti Island, the sea “was literally covered with foolish guillemots and with razor-billed auks (Alca torva).” Further on, the air was filled with velvet ducks. On the rocks of the Gulf, the herring gulls, the terns (great, Arctic, and probably Foster’s), the Tringa pusilla, the sea-gulls, the auks, the Scoter ducks, the wild geese (Anser canadensis), the red-breasted merganser, the cormorants, etc., were all breeding. The sea-gulls were extremely abundant there; “they are forever harassing every other bird, sucking their eggs and devouring their young;” “they take here the place of eagles and hawks.”

On the Missouri, above Saint Louis, Audubon saw, in 1843, vultures and eagles nesting in colonies. Thus he mentioned “long lines of elevated shore, surmounted by stupendous rocks of limestone, with many curious holes in them, where we saw vultures and eagles enter towards dusk” — that is, Turkey buzzards (Cathartes aura) and bald eagles (Haliaëtus leucocephalus), E. Couës remarks in a footnote (vol. i. p. 458).

One of the best breeding-grounds along the British shores are the Farne Islands, and one will find in Charles Dixon’s work, Among the Birds in Northern Shires, a lively description of these grounds, where scores of thousands of gulls, terns, eider-ducks, cormorants, ringed plovers, oyster-catchers, guillemots, and puffins come together every year. “On approaching some of the islands the first impression is that this gull (the lesser black-backed gull) monopolizes the whole of the ground, as it occurs in such vast abundance. The air seems full of them, the ground and bare rocks are crowded; and as our boat finally grates against the rough beach and we eagerly jump ashore all becomes noisy excitement — a perfect babel of protesting cries that is persistently kept up until we leave the place” (p. 219).