Lawrence Mcninch, age 10, of So. Portland, Me., for his question:

What is a muttonbird?

The muttonbird is never seen north of the equator. But if you live near the sea, you know some of his graceful cousins. He is a southern relative of our petrels and fuluars, those gull type birds that spend their lives on and near the ocean. The muttonbird and his distant cousins are at home on the waves. Most of them are fine swimmers and divers.
There is a roundabout story to explain the odd name of the muttonbird. It began in France, where mouton was always the name for sheep. In 1066, the tale shifted to England with the Norman conquest. William I was England's first Norman king, and his native language was French. The English did not swap their language for French, but they adopted many French words.
They kept their own word sheep and used it for the living animal. They adopted the French word mouton, changed it to mutton and used it to mean the meat of the sheep. Later, the English took themselves and their language to Australia where they found a worldful of strange animals, all needing names. They used their name for sheep meat to name the muttonbird.
These gracefla1, sea going birds are really shearwaters, cousins of our gull type petrels and fulmars. The Australians found them nesting along their rocky shores on lonely, off shore islands. They found different shearwaters ranging in size from pigeons to large gulls.
The satiny, water repe11ent plumage of these birds usually is a sober blend of white with gays and browns. Some have tails tipped with black. In most cases, the bills and feet are gray or black, though some shearwaters have bills and feet of pink or blue. All of them are excellent fishermen, able to swim and dive below the waves for their food. They fly low, skimming the water and clearing the crests of the waves   which is how they earned the Old World name of shearwater
The Australians named these southern birds from their chicks. The big, fluffy young birds squat helpless in their nests for many weeks. Their doting parents stuff them with partly digested fish, rich in oil, and the chicks become very fat. The settlers learned from the natives that the young fatties were good to eat. They samp1ed some of this bird meat, and it reminded them of sheep meat. The shearwaters of Australia were promptly named muttonbirds.
The shearhlaters are classed in the order procellariiformes, along with 57 graceful sea going birds. They are cousins of the soaring stormy petrel and the agile diving petrel which can swim underwater and. Burst up through the waves in full flight. The giant of this bird order is the great albatross which spends most of his life far from land above the lonely oceans.