File:A history of birds (1910) (14563273777).jpg

Identifier: historyofbirds00pycr (find matches)
Title: A history of birds
Year: 1910 (1910s)
Authors: Pycraft, W. P. (William Plane), 1868-1942
Subjects: Birds
Publisher: London, Methuen and Co
Contributing Library: American Museum of Natural History Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Biodiversity Heritage Library

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rpeted with young Terns of twospecies, many living and nearly full-fledged, many dead androtting, and many reduced to clean-picked skeletons with onlythe quill feathers still sticking to the wing-bones. . . . We soondiscovered that one great cause of the wholesale destruction ofyoung birds was the voracity of swarms of large hermit crabs(Ccenobita), for again and again we found recently killed birds inall the beauty of their first speckled plumage being torn topieces by a writhing pack of these ghostly crustaceans. Therewere plenty of large ocypode crabs too (O. ceratophthalvius)aiding in the carnage. And he continues: Moseley, in hisNotes of a Naturalist on the Challenger, made mention of agrapsus crab that he saw on St. Pauls Rocks carrying off anewly hatched Tern, but such an accident does not shock onesfeelings nearly so much as does the thought of full-grown youngbirds, nearly ready to fly out into the world and to exercisetheir intelligence, being overpowered by force of numbers
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•J JJ i s RELATIONS TO ANIMATE ENVIRONMENT 117 and slowly eaten alive by animals so far inferior in thescale. Strangely enough, the nestlings of the Booby (Siila leucog-nstcr) and of the Noddies (Anous stolidns and A. inelanogenys)which Moseley found on St. Pauls Rocks, defended themselvesvigorously and successfully from the similar attacks of thiscrab (G rap sits strigosns). It may here be noted that while many birds appear tosuffer the spoliation of their nests and the slaughter of theiryoung by their more rapacious neighbours, if not with indiffer-ence, at least with but a feeble show of resistance, othersprofiting by experience have adopted measures whereby theymay escape these unwelcome attentions. Thus Moseley onhis visit to Inaccessible Island found that feral pigs had nearlyexterminated a Penguin rookery on the south side of the island,but a (q.\v Penguins remained which had saved themselves bybuilding in holes under stones where the pigs could not reachthem. Similarly, the

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