Birds and Birding's Guide to:

Watching THE PLOVER-LIKE BIRDS

THE GULLS AND THEIR ALLIES

Briin-nich's Murre

Distinguished by a slightly shorter bill and rather darker head is Briin-nich's Murre (U. lomvia), which inhabits the coasts of the Arctic Ocean and North Atlantic, ranging somewhat southward in winter, while its larger race, known as Pallas's Murre (U. I. ana), is found along the coasts and islands of Bering Sea and the Aleutian Islands.

This splendid bird, the Arrie of the natives in imitation of its harsh note, breeds in countless thousands on the Pribilof Islands, its single egg being large and very fancifully colored, — a blue, green, whitish, or grayish ground, shot with dark brown mottlings and patches. At the risk of prolixity we quote extensively from Mr. Elliott's entertaining account of them in their summer home on St. Georges Island.”They lay their eggs upon the points and narrow shelves, on the faces of the cliff fronts to the island, straddling over their eggs, side by side, as thickly as they can crowd, making no nests.

They quarrel desperately, but not by scolding; it is spirited action, and so earnestly do they fight, that all along below the high bluffs of the north shore of St. George, when I passed thereunder during the breeding season, I stepped over hundreds of dead birds which had fallen and dashed themselves to death upon the rocks while clinched in combat with their rivals. . . .

Their curious straddling, whereby the egg is warmed and hatched, lasts nearly twenty-eight days, and then the young comes out with a dark, thick coat of down, which is supplanted by the plumage and color of the old bird in less than six weeks. They are fed by the disgorging parents, seemingly without a moment's intermission, uttering all the while between the gulps a hoarse, harsh croak, lugubrious enough.”Of the curious”dress-parade”of the males which takes place daily after the females have begun to sit over the eggs, he says:

“At regular hours in the morning and in the evening, the males go flying round and round the island, in great files and platoons, always circling against or quartering on the wind; and they make in this way, during a sustained period of hours at a time, a dark girdle of birds more than a quarter of a mile broad and more than thirty miles long, flying so thickly together that the wings of one fairly strike those of the other; and as they go, they whirl in swift, revolving, endless succession, during the periods just mentioned.”

Mr. Palmer, who visited the islands more than twenty years after Mr. Elliott, states that his account of these birds is as true to-day as it then was, and after careful observations and computations is of the opinion that in 1898 there could hardly have been less than 9,000,000 birds in evidence.

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