the Eucla on the following Tuesday. I therefore revisited Charley Island, and found the Fleshy-footed Petrels in fairly large numbers, and mostly with eggs, some showing slight signs of incubation, but several were quite fresh and white. I also found a nest of a Western Brown Hawk, probably the bird we shot on the former visit was the owner. This nest was a very large structure of sticks and twigs, placed in a medium-sized paper bark tea-tree, about 15 feet from the ground, and contained two slightly incubated eggs. Immediately beneath the nest was another belonging to a former occupation. We then proceeded to Rabbit Island, about half a mile distant, and found more burrows of the Fleshy-footed Petrel, and two nests of the Little Penguin, both containing two eggs. This excursion occupied the whole of December 10th.
On Monday, 12th, Wright and I started out for Sandy Hook Island, 12 miles as the crow flies, but as we had to beat the whole way, we must have covered four times that distance in the seven hours it took us to reach a point a mile from the island. Here the wind dropped, so we took the dinghy and pulled over the remaining distance, only to find that the surge was too heavy to allow a landing. There is a cove with a beach on the southern side of the island, but to reach this would have meant pulling the dinghy two miles further, and three back to the boat, so we abandoned Sandy Hook and landed on Gunton Island, which we had passed on the way out. This island proved barren of all birds except the Singing Honey-eater and a solitary Kestrel.
This completed our island visits, as the Eucla was expected to arrive the following evening, and we had all our specimens to pack up. The results of the expedition, so far as regards the bird life, were not very encouraging, but the experience gained would be useful in the event of another expedition being undertaken. The failure of the motor boat made a great difference in the matter of time, the beating in and out against contrary winds and currents in a sailing boat hampered us seriously, and the necessity for constant caution in case of a change of wind prevented us from examining many of the smaller islands which we passed by, but could have visited had we been certain of getting away independently of the wind. This is a country of contrary winds, and the islands are widely scattered over a sea that is only navigable by daylight and in finest weather. Rocks awash and reefs jut out in every direction, and one sails over an unbroken surface for a while and then runs on to "foul ground" where the seas jump up in a most upsetting manner. The Admiralty charts contain the warning words, "Dangerous to navigation," and a strictly defined track is marked, outside of which, of course, lie the most desirable of the islands— those that have never been used for depasturing sheep or burnt off. Landing on all but the most frequented (about four) is a matter of chance, and always attended with danger. The handling of
