With precipitous, rocky walls weathered into innumerable ledges, shelves, and crevices—all fit nesting sites—one might think of it as a colossal lodging house for the countless sea-bird tenants who find here not only a suitable place for the reproduction of their young, but in the surrounding waters an abundant and unfailing supply of food. Add to these conditions the Rock’s isolation and inaccessibility, its shoreless outline, and the difficulty with which it may be ascended, and we have indeed an ideal refuge for sea fowl, one in which, unless they were subjected to special persecution, they might have continued to exist for centuries, had not the transforming influences of civilization reached even to this isle of the sea. Bird Rock is about fifty miles northwest of Cape Breton, the nearest mainland, and twelve east of Bryon Island, its next neighbor in the Magdalen group, to which it belongs. It is three hundred and fifty yards long, from fifty to one hundred and forty yards wide, and rises abruptly from the sea to a height of from eighty to one hundred and forty feet. Its outline, the nature of its base, sides, and summit are well indicated by the accompanying pictures. [Illustration: 80. Bird Rock from the southwest; distant about one half a mile.] Three quarters of a mile northeast of Bird Rock, or Great Bird, as it is more specifically called, lies Little Bird, a red sandstone rock which at high tide, or from a distance, appears as two. The shallow water between Great and Little Birds suggests the possibility of a past connection and the probability that in some future geological age the waves will have completed their work of destruction, when both islands will have disappeared. The history of these bird-inhabited islands is interesting, and gives us some information of the changes which man has wrought in their bird life. It begins with the account given by Jacques Cartier of his voyage to Canada in 1534. Of the Bird Rocks he wrote: “We came to three islands, two of which are as steep and upright as any wall, so that it was not possible to climb them, and between them is a little rock. These islands were as full of birds as any meadow is of grass, which there do make their nests, and in the greatest of them there was a great and infinite number of those that we called Margaulx, that are white and bigger than any geese, which were severed in one part. In the other were only Godetz, but toward the shore there were of those Godetz and great Apponatz, like to those of that island that we above have mentioned. We went down to the lowest part of the least island, where we killed above a thousand of those Godetz and Apponatz. We put into our boats as many as we pleased, for in less than one hour we might have filled thirty such boats of them. We named them the islands of the Margaulx.”