The Boobies seldom wander more than twenty leagues from land, to which they usually return every evening, and their appearance is considered by mariners as a sure token of their vicinity to some island or cosset.
The colour of the Sala fusee, or Brown Booby, is blackish-brown, or ashy-brown above and whitish beneath ; the primaries are black, and the naked skin about the face is reddish; the orbits and base of the bill are yellow, and the point of the bill is brown; the legs are of a straw colour.
In length the Brown Booby is about 2 feet 5 inches, the bill measuring 45 inches or thereabout, and the tail 10 inches : the young birds aro spotted with white and brown. • It is almost impossible to open the pages of the old voyagers who have fallen in with these Boobies without finding some entertaining accounts of the constant persecution to which the latter are subjected by the Frigates or Man-of-War Birds. Lesson indeed doubts this. He says, " The boobies have been so named because it has been supposed that the frigates compelled them to disgorge the fish which they had taken ; but this appears to ua•to be erroneous. The booby is warlike, he lives fearlessly near the frigate, and swallows the fish which he has captured in peace." Buffon, Cuvier, and Temminck, on
the contrary, evidently give credence to the narratives of the Frigate persecution, and indeed it is difficult to believe that so many eye witnesses should be mistaken.
that of the raven and the goose ; and this quailing is beard more particularly when they are pursued by the frigate, or, when assembled together, they happen to be seized by any sudden panic." Their nests, according to Dampier, are built in trees in the Isle of Ayes, though they have been observed in other places to nestle on the ground. They always associate in numbers in the same spot, and lay one or two eggs. The young aro covered with a very soft and• white down. Nuttall says that they abound on rocky islets off the coast of Cayenne and along the shores of New Spain and Caracas, as well as in Brazil and on the Bahamas, where they are said to breed almost every month in the year. In summer, be adds, they are not uncommon on the coasts of the Southern States of North America.
• The flesh he describes as black and unsavoury.
Other species of Sala are also called Boobies. [SuLA.1