MIGRATORY BIRDS

Waipa Post, Volume 49, Issue 3554, 6 December 1934, Page 6

MIGRATORY BIRDS

Beach inspectors and others along the coast are being kept busy collecting and destroying or burying

of thousands of migratory mutton birds that have been forced down into the surf by exhaustion to perish in the water (says the Sydney Sun). Hundreds were washed up at Maroubra, where council employees buried them. More than 7 0 dead birds were found on the beach at Manly on a recent evening. Hundreds of bodies were washed up at Tamarama, where they were collected in chaff bags and buried and at Bronte about 50 were found. One of the birds was seen swimming in the surf, but it was killled when it was washed upon the rocks. Millions of mutton-birds each year leave their breeding grounds on the islands of Bass Strait, said Mr J. R. Kinghorn (ornithologist of the Australian Museum). But where they spend the winter remains a mystery. Every season the birds are seen, in vast numbers, flying back from the east or north-east, and they reach the Bass Strait islands about October 26, sometimes a little later. This year, their ordinary surface food supplies—small fish, and a certain shrimp—-seem to have failed, and the birds are falling exhausted. • Probably hundreds of thousands are dead along the beaches of the eastern coast.