Bird Islands of Peru: the Record of a Sojourn on the West Coast

Abstract

THE western coast of South America is washed throughout a large part of its extent by a great river of cold water, an arm of the Pacific Antarctic drift. This, the Humboldt Current, has effects upon climate, vegetation, fauna, and human affairs that are no less profound than those of the Atlantic Current in north-western Europe. It is not until within nearly three hundred miles of the equator that the cold northerly flow leaves the coast, to sweep outwards past the. Galapagos and become lost in the expanses of ocean. Thus, along the Peruvian littoral we have temperatures which are very low in relation to latitude, and where tropical jungles might be expected to skirt the coastward base of the Andean range there is a strip of arid desert fringed with barren islands.

Bird Islands of Peru: the Record of a Sojourn on the West Coast.

By Robert Cushman Murphy. Pp. xx + 362 + 32 plates. (New York and London: G. P. Putnam's Sons, Ltd., 1925.) 15s. net.