w rubs and wabbles the young bird opened wide
its bill and let out shrill cries. The mother bobbed up and down in
evident consternation, walked away, came back, and with an eye on me
plainly sought to pacify her fledgling. Suddenly she put her bill far
down into the wide-open bill, effectually stifling the cries. Then the
two boobies stood locked in amazing convulsions. The throat of the
mother swelled, and a lump passed into and down the throat of the young
bird. The puzzle of the flying boobies was solved in the startling
realization that the mother had returned from the sea with a fish in her
stomach and had disgorged it into the gullet of her offspring.

[Illustration: RABIHORCADO RISING FROM THEIR EGGS]

[Illustration: BOOBIES OF ISLA DE LA MUERTE IN THE CARIBBEAN SEA]

I watched this feat performed dozens of times, and at length scared a
mother booby into withdrawing her bill and dropping a fish on the sand.
It was a flying-fish fully ten inches long. I interrupted several little
dinner-parties, and in each case found the disgorged fish to be of the
flying species. The boobies flew ten, twenty miles out to the open sea
for fish, while the innumerable shoals that lay around their island were
alive with sardine and herring!

I had raised a tremendous row; so, leaving the boobies to quiet down, I
made my way toward the flocks of _rabihorcados_. Here and there in the
thick growth of green weed were boobies squatting on isolated nests. No
sooner had I gotten close to the _rabihorcados_ than I made sure they
were the far-famed frigate pelicans, or man-of-war birds. They were as
tame as the boobies; as I walked among them many did not fly at all.
Others rose with soft, swishing sound of great wings and floated in a
circle, uttering deep-throated cries, not unlike the dismal croak of
ravens. Perfectly built for the air, they were like feathers blown by a
breeze. Light, thin, long, sharp, with enormous spread of wings,
beautiful with the beauty of dead, blue-black sheen, and yet hideous,
too, with their grisly necks and cruel, crooked beaks and vulture eyes,
they were surely magnificent specimens of winged creation.

Nests of dried weeds littered the ground, and eggs and young were
everywhere. The little ones were covered with white down, and the
developing feathers on their wings were turning black. They squalled
unremittingly, which squalling I decided was not so much on my account
as because of a swarm of black fl