Animals: Death .Flight

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High over Quebec there soared last week for the first time in many years great flocks of fat, black & white seabirds, flying toward the St. Lawrence River basin and death. They were Arctic murres (also called guillemots), cousins of the little auks who were stormbound in Manhattan last month (TIME, Dec. 5). The cause of their periodic suicide flight is a mystery which Canadian ornithologists hope this year to solve.

A crow-sized bird with set-back legs which make it stand upright like a penguin, the murre breeds in colonies on Arctic cliff ledges. It lays an egg pointed at one end so that it rolls in a circle, does not fall off the ledge. Once hunted for oil as were the extinct great auks, murres have grown scarce, are now protected by treaty between the U. S. and Canada. Only Indians and Eskimos may eat their eggs or kill them for food.

Like the little auk, the murre feeds on ocean Crustacea, starves inland. Last week Dr. William Reid Blair, director of New York's Bronx Zoo, thought the murres' death flight might be caused by a cyclical failure in their food supply.