of eggs is stopped entirely
about a month before the birds usually leave the island, so as to give
them all an opportunity to hatch out a brood.

[Illustration: CONTEST FOR THE EGGS.]

The murre is not good to eat. If undisturbed it lays two eggs only; when
robbed, it will keep on laying until it has produced six or even eight
eggs; and the manager of the islands told me that he had found as many as
eight eggs forming in a bird's ovaries when he killed and opened it in the
beginning of the season. The male bird regularly relieves the female on
the nest, and also watches to resist the attacks of the gull, which
not only destroys the eggs, but also eats the young. The murre feeds on
sea-grass and jelly-fish, and I was assured that though some hundreds had
been examined at different times, no fish had ever been found in a murre's
stomach.

The bird is small, about the size of a half-grown duck, but its egg is
as large as a goose egg. The egg is brown or greenish, and speckled. When
quite fresh it has no fishy taste, but when two or three days old the
fishy taste becomes perceptible. They are largely used in San Francisco by
the restaurants and bakers, and for omelets, cakes, and custards.

During the height of the egging season the gulls hover in clouds over the
rocks, and when a rookery is started, and the poor birds leave their nests
by hundreds, the air is presently alive with gulls flying off with the
eggs, and the eggers are sometimes literally drenched.

There is thus inevitably a considerable waste of eggs. I asked some of the
eggers how many murres nested on the South Farallon, and they thought at
least one hundred thousand. I do not suppose this an extravagant estimate,
for, taking the season of 1872, when seventeen thousand nine hundred and
fifty-two dozen eggs were actually sold in San Francisco, and allowing
half a dozen to each murre, this would give nearly thirty-six thousand
birds; and adding the proper number for eggs broken, destroyed by gulls,
and not gathered, the number of murres and gulls is probably over one
hundred thousand. This on an island less than a mile in its greatest
diameter, and partly occupied by the light-house and fog-whistle and their
keepers, and by other birds and a large number of sea-lions!

When they are done laying, and when the young can fly, the birds leave the
island, usually going off together. During the summer and fall they return
in clouds at intervals, but stay only a