Animals: Death .Flight

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....

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