Birds and Birding's Guide to:

Watching THE PLOVER-LIKE BIRDS

THE GULLS AND THEIR ALLIES

Auklets

Confined to the North Pacific is a group of six species (referred, however, to four genera) of curious miniature Auks known as Auklets or Pygmy Auks, some of which are hardly larger than Sparrows. They are distinguished from the Puffins by the fact that the terminal portion of the upper mandible is not transversely grooved, and the inner claw is of the same size and shape as the others. Of these the Whiskered Auklet (Simorhynchus pygmcBus) is perhaps the prettiest species of the whole family, being glossy blackish slate-color above and lead-colored below; the length is between seven and eight inches.

The head is ornamented with an erect, graceful, recurving crest of narrow, dull black plumes about one and a half inches in length, besides a series of slender, pointed white feathers commencing beneath the eye and extending backward across the ear-coverts.

They breed abundantly on many islands in Bering Sea, placing the egg in deep holes and crannies among the rocks. Closely allied is the Crested Auklet (S. cristatellus), which has the same recurved frontal crest but is of larger size, reaching the length of ten inches, and in addition has several deciduous plates on the broad portion of the bill, which are cast off after the nesting season. Smallest of all is the Least Auklet (5. pusillus), which is only five and a half to seven inches long. It lacks the frontal crest of the others, but has a curious knob on the base of the bill which falls off after the young are reared.

This species is especially abundant on the Pribilof Islands, where it occurs actually in millions during the breeding season, and constitutes one of the most marvelous aggregations of bird life in the world.”I can only compare their numbers to an apiary,”says Mr. William Palmer,”when the hives are placed, for acres, about fifty feet apart. Now, imagining that all these hives swarm at once, that each bee is larger than a Swallow and flying in an almost straight line, each about its own business, we may then have some idea of what can be seen every summer evening about seven o'clock on the west side of the village of St. George.”They begin to arrive with great regularity each year about May ist or 4th, and by June ist or 6th have come in such numbers as to suggest to Elliott the swarms of locusts that sometimes infest the western plains.

They frequent the loose stony reefs and boulder-strewn bars of the island, making no nest, but depositing the single egg deep down among the loose rocks or deep within the crevices and chinks in the faces of the cliffs.”

To walk over their breeding grounds at this season,”Mr. Elliott says,”is highly interesting and most amusing, as the noise of hundreds and thousands of these little birds, which are directly under your feet, gives rise to an endless variation of volume of sound as it comes up from the stony holes and caverns below.”The males leave early in the morning for their feeding grounds far out to sea, where they secure their food of small water-shrimps and sea-fleas, and returning in the evening bring food for the young, and, it is thought probable, for their sitting partners as well.

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