THE SEA-BIRDS’ HOME
After my wandering for years among the quiet lanes and along the
winding cow-paths of the home fields, my trip to the wild-bird rocks
in the Pacific Ocean, as you can imagine, was a thrilling experience.
We chartered a little launch at Tillamook, and, after a fight of hours
and hours to cross Tillamook Bar at the mouth of the bay, we got out
upon the wide Pacific, and steamed down the coast for Three-Arch
Rocks, which soon began to show far ahead of us just off the rocky
shore.
I had never been on the Pacific before, nor had I ever before seen the
birds that were even now beginning to dot the sea and to sail over and
about us as we steamed along. It was all new, so new that the very
water of the Pacific looked unlike the familiar water of the Atlantic.
And surely the waves were different,--longer, grayer, smoother, with
an immensely mightier heave. At least they seemed so, for every time
we rose on the swell, it was as if our boat were in the hand of Old
Ocean, and his mighty arm were “putting” us, as the athlete “puts” the
shot. It was all new and strange and very wild to me, with the wild
cries of the sea-birds already beginning to reach us as flocks of the
birds passed around and over our heads.
The fog was lifting. The thick, wet drift that had threatened our
little launch on Tillamook Bar stood clear of the shouldering sea to
the westward, and in over the shore, like an upper sea, hung at the
fir-girt middles of the mountains, as level and as gray as the sea
below. There was no breeze. The long, smooth swell of the Pacific
swung under us and in, until it whitened at the base of the three
rocks that rose out of the sea in our course, and that now began to
take on form in the foggy distance. Gulls were flying over us, lines
of black cormorants and crowds of murres were winging past, but we
were still too far away from the looming rocks to see that the gray of
their walls was the gray of uncounted colonies of nesting birds,
colonies that covered their craggy steeps as, on shore, the green firs
clothed the slopes of the Coast Range Mountains up to the hanging fog.
As we ran on nearer, the sound of the surf about the rocks became
audible, the birds in the air grew more numerous, their cries now
faintly mingling with the sound of the sea. A hole in the side of the
middle Rock, a mere fleck of foam it seemed at first, widened rapidly
into an arching tunnel through which our boat might run; the swell of
the sea began to break over half-sunken ledges; and soon upon us fell
the damp shadows of the three great rocks, for now we were looking far
up at their sides, where we could see the birds in their guano-gray
rookeries, rookery over rookery,--gulls, cormorants, guillemots,
puffins, murres,--encrusting the sides from tide-line to pinnacles, as
the crowding barnacles encrusted the bases from the tide-line down.
[Illustration: TUFTED PUFFINS]
We had not approached without protest, for the birds were coming off
to meet us, wheeling and clacking overhead, the nearer we drew, in a
constantly thickening cloud of lowering wings and tongues. The clamor
was indescribable, the tossing flight enough to make one mad with the
motion of wings. The air was filled, thick, with the whirling and the
screaming, the clacking, the honking, close to our ears, and high up
in the peaks, and far out over the waves. Never had I been in this
world before. Was I on my earth? or had I suddenly wakened up in some
old sea world where there was no dry land, no life but this?
We rounded the outer or Shag Rock and headed slowly in opposite the
yawning hole of the middle Rock as into some mighty cave, so sheer and
shadowy rose the walls above us,--so like to cavern thunder was the
throbbing of the surf through the hollow arches, was the flapping and
screaming of the birds against the high circling walls, was the deep,
menacing grumble of the bellowing sea-lions, as, through the muffle of
surf and sea-fowl, herd after herd lumbered headlong into the foam.
It was a strange, wild scene. Hardly a mile from the Oregon coast, but
cut off by breaker and bar from the abrupt, uninhabited shore, the
three rocks of the Reservation, each pierced with its resounding arch,
heaved their huge shoulders from the waves straight up, high,
towering, till our little steamer coasted their dripping sides like
some puffing pygmy.
Each rock was perhaps as large as a solid city square and as high as
the tallest of sky-scrapers; immense, monstrous piles, each of them,
and run through by these great caverns or arches, dim, dripping,
filled with the noise of the waves and the beat of thousands of wings.
They were of no part or lot with the dry land. Their wave-scooped
basins were set with purple starfish and filled with green and pink
anemones, and beaded many deep with mussels of amethyst and jet that
glittered in the clear beryl waters; and, above the jeweled basins,
like fabled beasts of old, lay the sea-lions, uncouth forms,
flippered, reversed in shape, with throats like the caves of Æolus,
hollow, hoarse, discordant; and higher up, on every jutting bench and
shelf, in every weathered rift, over every jog of the ragged cliffs,
to their bladed backs and pointed peaks, swarmed the sea-birds,
webfooted, amphibious, shaped of the waves, with stormy voices given
them by the winds that sweep in from the sea.
As I looked up at the amazing scene, at the mighty rocks and the
multitude of winging forms, I seemed to see three swirling piles of
life, three cones that rose like volcanoes from the ocean, their sides
covered with living lava, their craters clouded with the smoke of
wings, while their bases seemed belted by the rumble of a
multi-throated thunder. The very air was dank with the smell of
strange, strong volcanic gases,--no breath of the land, no odor of
herb, no scent of fresh soil; but the raw, rank smells of rookery and
den, saline, kelpy, fetid; the stench of fish and bedded guano, and of
the reeking pools where the sea-lion herds lay sleeping on the lower
rocks in the sun.
A boat’s keel was beneath me, but as I stood out on the pointed prow,
barely above the water, and found myself thrust forward without will
or effort among the crags and caverns, among the shadowy walls, the
damps, the smells, the sounds, among the bellowing beasts in the
churning waters about me, and into the storm of wings and tongues in
the whirling air above me, I passed from the things I had known, and
the time and the earth of man, into a monstrous period of the past.
This was the home of the sea-birds. Amid all the din we landed from a
yawl and began our climb toward the top of Shag Rock, the outermost of
the three. And here we had another and a different sight of the wild
life. It covered every crag. I clutched it in my hands; I crushed it
under my feet; it was thick in the air about me. My narrow path up the
face of the rock was a succession of sea-bird rookeries, of crowded
eggs, and huddled young, hairy or naked or wet from the shell. Every
time my fingers felt for a crack overhead they touched something warm
that rolled or squirmed; every time my feet moved under me, for a
hold, they pushed in among top-shaped eggs that turned on the shelf or
went over far below; and whenever I hugged the pushing wall I must
bear off from a mass of squealing, struggling, shapeless things, just
hatched. And down upon me, as rookery after rookery of old birds
whirred in fright from their ledges, fell crashing eggs and unfledged
young, that the greedy gulls devoured ere they touched the sea.
I was midway in the climb, at a bad turn round a point, edging inch by
inch along, my face pressed against the hard face of the rock, my feet
and fingers gripping any crack or seam they could feel, when out of
the deep space behind me I caught the swash of waves. Instantly a cold
hand seemed to clasp me from behind.
I flattened against the rock, my whole body, my very mind clinging
desperately for a hold,--a falling fragment of shale, a gust of wind,
the wing-stroke of a frightened bird, enough to break the hold and
swing me out over the water, washing faint and far below. A long
breath, and I was climbing again.
[Illustration: BRANDT’S CORMORANT]
We were on the outer Rock, our only possible ascent taking us up the
sheer south face. With the exception of an occasional Western gull’s
and pigeon guillemot’s nest, these steep sides were occupied entirely
by the California murres,--penguin-shaped birds about the size of a
small wild duck, chocolate-brown above, with white breasts,--which
literally covered the sides of the three great rocks wherever they
could find a hold. If a million meant anything, I should say there
were a million murres nesting on this outer Rock; not nesting either,
for the egg is laid upon the bare ledge, as you might place it upon a
mantel,--a single sharp-pointed egg, as large as a turkey’s, and just
as many of them on the ledge as there is standing-room for the birds.
The murre broods her very large egg by standing straight up over it,
her short legs, by dint of stretching, allowing her to straddle it,
her short tail propping her securely from behind.
On, up along the narrow back, or blade, of the rock, and over the
peak, were the well-spaced nests of the Brandt’s cormorants, nests the
size of an ordinary straw hat, made of sea-grass and the
yellow-flowered sulphur-weed that grew in a dense mat over the north
slope of the top, each nest holding four long, dirty blue eggs or as
many black, shivering young; and in the low sulphur-weed, all along
the roof-like slope of the top, built the gulls and the tufted
puffins; and, with the burrowing puffins, often in the same holes,
were found the Kaeding’s petrels; while down below them, as up above
them,--all around the rock-rim that dropped sheer to the sea,--stood
the cormorants, black, silent, statuesque; and everywhere were nests
and eggs and young, and everywhere were flying, crying birds--above,
about, and far below me, a whirling, whirring vortex of wings that had
caught me in its funnel.