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Updated: June 19, 2025
We saw here some cormorants, gulls, crab-catchers, etc., a few small land-birds, and a sort of white parrot, which flew a great many together. We found some shellfish, namely limpets, periwinkles, and abundance of small oysters, growing on the rocks, which were very sweet. In the sea we saw some green-turtle, a pretty many sharks, and abundance of water-snakes of several sorts and sizes.
I have before described the carrion-vulture of Polyborus. There are some other hawks, owls, and a few small land-birds. The waterfowl are particularly numerous, and they must formerly, from the accounts of the old navigators, have been much more so. One day I observed a cormorant playing with a fish which it had caught.
The new bank is not long left unvisited by sea-birds; salt-plants take root upon it, and a kind of soil begins to be formed; a cocoa-nut, or the seed of some other tree, is thrown on shore; land-birds visit it, and deposit the seeds of fresh shrubs or trees; every high tide, and still more every gale, adds something to the bank; the form of an island is by degrees assumed; and, last of all, comes man to take possession.
The plovers and sandpipers and snips run rapidly. Among the land-birds, the grouse, pigeons, quails, larks and various blackbirds walk. The swallows walk, also, whenever they use their feet at all, but very awkwardly. The larks walk with ease and grace.
The remaining land-birds form a most singular group of finches, related to each other in the structure of their beaks, short tails, form of body and plumage: there are thirteen species which Mr. Gould has divided into four sub-groups.
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