THE GREAT SHEARWATER IN SCOTTISH WATERS 145 



by this fact, I inquired of Mr. Clarke as to the state of the 

 specimen he had received, and he was good enough to inform 

 me that " it too is practically without outer primaries, these 

 feathers being only a quarter of their full-grown length or 

 even less." Turning to O'Reilly (" Greenland," etc., London, 

 1818, p. 140, pi. xii. fig. i), who happens to have been the 

 first describer of the species, I find that his figure (which Mr. 

 Saunders, with extreme good nature, has called "excellent") 

 represents a bird which was obviously in the same condition 

 the tip of its wings coming considerably short of that of 

 the tail, which when full grown they should equal or surpass ; 

 while Mr. Saunders stated (Yarrell, " British Birds," ed. 4, vol. 

 iv. p. 1 6) that a specimen labelled as from Greenland, 28th 

 June I 876, in the late Mr. Hargitt's collection, had " the outer 

 primaries in their sheaths and undeveloped." ^ Moreover, 

 Messrs. Harvie-Brown and Barrington, in their report on the 

 ornithology of Rockall as observed in the expeditions of 1896, 

 state (" Trans. Roy. Irish Acad.," vol. xxxi. pt. iii. p. 72), on the 

 authority of Mr. Popham, that of the Great Shearwaters seen 

 by him, as before mentioned, soon after our meeting with 

 them in June I 894, " there were no young birds amongst them, 

 but the old birds could scarcely fly, having apparently moulted 

 out their primaries." That gentleman doubtless obtained 

 specimens which enabled him to make this remark. 



I must confess that I was completely deceived by the 

 behaviour of the birds we saw, especially after finding them 

 for the second time disposed in pairs, as they almost invari- 

 ably were. They reminded me of the pairs of Turtle Doves 

 that rise before or beside one in succession as one crosses a 

 field in England just after their arrival in spring, and I fully 

 believed that these Shearwaters must be on their way to some 



1 I do not know on whose authority Mr. Saunders states (" Manual of British 

 Birds," ed. 2, p. 738) that on alighting this species "strikes the water with great 

 violence, in a manner quite different from that of a Gull, and then dives." I can 

 only say that those we saw settle on the water did so just as other Shearwaters do, 

 and that I did not see one dive, though they doubtless get much of their food in that 

 way. That gentleman is mistaken when he declares that Faber " never handled 

 a specimen." What Faber said was that he never saw the species in life, but that 

 he obtained a stuffed skin from southern Iceland. He also saw a specimen from 

 that island in the Berlin Museum, and mentions a third, which I suppose he had 

 also seen, in the collection of Benicken, believed to have come from Greenland 

 <" Isis," 1824, col. 785). 



