The Albatrosses of the Laysan Islands show far less fear of man than do barnyard fowls—in short, if it were necessary, hundreds of instances might be cited to show that distrust of man is an acquired and not a natural trait of animals. Having these facts in mind, therefore, I bethought me of some island or islands which were neither at the antipodes nor either pole, and where birds were not only abundant, but in such happy ignorance of man that no difficulty would be experienced in securing their photographs. These would not only have a present interest and value, but would also form permanent records of conditions already threatened by the destructive tendencies of the age. After carefully considering all the more easily reached islets of the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, my choice fell on certain of the bird rocks of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The name bird rock is used in both a general and a special sense. In the former it may be applied to many of the rocky islets of the gulf, in the latter it relates exclusively to _the_ Bird Rocks at the northeastern end of the Magdalen group. Percé Rock, Bonaventure Island, the Magdalens, and the Bird Rocks themselves seemed to offer the best opportunities to the bird photographer, and, accompanied by my best assistant, I departed for the first named on July 2, 1898. Percé Rock^{71} (so named because its base has been pierced by the action of the waves) lies about three hundred feet off the land at the town of Percé, on the west side of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. A semiweekly steamer from Dalhousie, near the head of Bay of Chaleur, furnishes the regular means of communication with Percé, and the town at once possesses a distinction over any place on the line of a railway. For, aside from every other reason, there is a pervasiveness about the smoke of a railway locomotive which contaminates the atmosphere and robs local influences of half their potency. Doubtless there are persons who would be glad to change the aroma of Percé’s fishyards for the stifling air of a railway tunnel, but give me the pungent odor of Percé’s drying cod unadulterated. Even the steamer does not touch Percé, and we were landed by a boat in a sea just rough enough to make the experience interesting. At the pier no hotel agent greeted us, for Percé possesses neither hotel nor boarding house, and summer resorters are almost unknown. This was a delightful discovery. We had come in search of an isolated colony of birds, and we found also an isolated colony of man—quaint fisher folk whose _patois_ French had a gratefully foreign sound. [Illustration: 71. Percé Rock from the north.]