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"The
bushes, which once offered favorable nesting sites, are
girdled, the bunch grass undermined and destroyed and the
loose coral sand, no longer anchored by a network of roots,
shifts in great clouds at every turn of the wind. . . .The
winds start the sands drifting, and the young birds are
smothered under the forming dunes. . . . The little petrels,
nesting underground, are the most terribly punished. I have
found where they worked their way to the surface of their
filled burrows and, unable to go farther, had died with
their heds just above ground, buried alive,--and not one
or two, but thousands." (Bailey 1912)
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