55 nests with 1 egg each; 63 „ „ 2 eggs „ 23 „ „ 3 „ „ 63 „ „ 1 young each; 46 „ „ 2 „ „ 1 nest „ 3 „ „ Incubation was found to be well advanced in eggs which were alone in their nest, showing either that one egg sometimes composes the set, or that the other eggs of the set had been destroyed. The fact that one nest was found with three young while twenty-three were found each containing three eggs, would indicate a high mortality among the young birds; and, indeed, no less than 94 dead young were counted. Most of these, however, were birds which were old enough to leave the nest, and death was doubtless due to the thoughtlessness of tourist visitors, who chase the young about until they fall from exhaustion, or are driven too far to find their way home. Estimating the number of young birds which had left the 594 deserted nests at 891—which would be an average of one and a half birds to the nest—and adding two parent birds to each nest, we have 2,581 birds on wing and on foot. But this number is to be increased by the 152 young that were still in their nests, making the probable total population of Pelican Island 2,736. This calculation, however, does not take into account the eggs, from which almost hourly came new inhabitants of the island; and it is with these eggs, or rather with the nest in which they are placed, that we may begin a brief outline of the young Pelican’s development. The Pelican, although a low type of bird, is altricial, the young, unlike the offspring of Gulls, Ducks, or Snipe, being hatched in a helpless condition. The nest, therefore, is not only an incubator where with heat from the parent bird the eggs are hatched, but it is a cradle for the young. Consequently, Pelicans’ nests are unusually complicated structures as compared with the dwellings of other birds equally low in the evolutionary scale. There was a very interesting and constant relation between the character of the nest and its site, ground nests being composed largely or entirely of long grasses, while those nests which were placed in the trees were made of sticks and were lined with grasses, the nest proper being erected on a platform of larger sticks laid from crotch to crotch in the bushes in such a manner as to form a broad, firm foundation, though, structurally, it was not a part of the nest, which could be lifted without removing the platform. [Illustration: 106. Newly hatched Pelicans. Ground nest.]