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Instead, she saw a flat, sunlit main, with occasional sea-parrots flapping their fat bodies out of the ship's course. A glistening head popped up from the waters abreast, and she heard the cry of "seal!" Dressing, the girl noted minutely the personal articles scattered about the cabin, striving to derive therefrom some fresh hint of the characteristics of the owners.
The soaring "goonies" that had followed them from Flattery had dropped astern at first sight of the volcanic headlands, and now countless thousands of sea-parrots fled from the ship's path, squattering away in comic terror, dragging their fat bodies across the sea as a boy skips a flat rock.
"Look out, Jesse, there comes another!" Sure enough, one after another of the dead bodies of the sea-parrots fell on the narrow beach, until two or three dozen were lying there. Jimmy ceased his labors, climbed down the rocks, and calmly began to skin off the breast plumage of the birds. "What's he doing that for?" asked Jesse of Rob. "They're not good to eat," said Rob, "that's one thing sure.
Looks as if we were too late for a real good egg season." "Well," said Rob, "anyhow, we have had a good climb and a good look over the country. Now, what I propose to do is to see what there is lower down on the face of the cliff. I'm sure there's a lot of sea-parrots there, because I can see them flying in and out down below." "Let me go down, Rob," said John. "I'm lighter than you are."
Innumerable species of ducks, geese, and swans many of them unknown to the American ornithologist swarm about every little pool of water in the valleys and upon the lower plains; gulls, fish-hawks, and eagles, keep up a continual screaming about the mouths of the numerous rivers; and the rocky precipitous coast of the sea is literally alive with countless millions of red-beaked puffin or sea-parrots, which build their nests in the crevices and upon the ledges of the most inaccessible cliffs, and at the report of a pistol fly in clouds which fairly darken the air.
The birds which breed upon the Farallones are gulls, murres, shags, and sea-parrots, the last a kind of penguin. The eggs of the shags and parrots are not used, but the eggers destroy them to make more room for the other birds. The gull begins to lay about the middle of May, and usually ten days before the murre.
There the sea-parrots breed, and so thickly that you can scarcely set foot ashore without plunging into their houses; but there is a mound near the western end where no sea-parrot may come, for the herring-gulls and the black-backs claim it for their own.
Rob's daring was rewarded by the finding of countless numbers of nests of the sea-parrots, which were bored back straight into the face of the cleft. "Here they are, boys!" he called back, his voice being even by this time barely distinguishable amid the clamor of the gulls and other wild birds which continuously circled about.
They filled our thoughts, our lives for the time: great cormorants and northern divers, flitting red-legged oyster-catchers, shags spreading their wings to the wind and sun, sea-parrots, murrs, razor-bills, gannets questing by ones and twos now poised, now dropping like plummets with a resounding splash; sandpipers and curlews dotting the beaches, and wading; tern, common gulls, herring-gulls, and kittiwakes, and, at nightfall, shearwaters popping from their holes and swimming and skimming around our boat as we headed for home.
I'll tell you what I've seen some dark-colored feather coats and blankets at the trader's store down below Valdez. I'll warrant they were made out of the breasts of these very sea-parrots here." Whatever were Jimmy's plans he could not or did not disclose them.
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