74 ANNALS OF SCOTTISH NATURAL HISTORY 



me the following morning. The same day one was shot on the 

 moor at Lochanhead. iVnother bird was sent to Mr. Hastings from 

 Glen JE. Mr. Robert M'Call saw one off Carsethorn on the 24th. 

 Two others were sent from some one in Dumfries to a person in 

 Carlisle. Mr. R. Armstrong, Thornhill, tells me he saw a small Skua 

 sweeping along the troubled surface of the sea off Fairlie, in Ayrshire, 

 on the morning after the stormy night of the i8th-i9th. Coupling 

 this with the fact that Skuas were shot so far inland as Lochanhead 

 Moor and Glen JE, it is highly probable that the Skuas may have 

 travelled over the well-known fly line betwixt the Ayrshire coast and 

 the Solway Firth. — Robert Service, Maxwelltown. 



Button's Skua {Stercorarius parasiticus, L.) in the Scottish 

 Solway area. — Although Buffon's Skua has occasionally occurred in 

 Southern Scotland, its appearances within the faunal area embraced by 

 the Scottish Solway are sufficiently irregular to be worth chronicling. 

 I have examined two fine adults of this Skua, males in change, sent to 

 a bird-stuffer in Carlisle from the neighbourhood of Dumfries on or 

 about the 17th of October. Nine others were shot about the same 

 time on the north-west coast of England, and these Scottish birds 

 were no doubt travelling down the Irish Channel with the rest when 

 a strong gale on 16th October induced them to seek the shelter of 

 the Solway coast. One of the Dumfries birds retained the long 

 central rectrices. The other had moulted these feathers. — H. A. 

 Macpherson, Carlisle, 26th October 1891. 



Great Shearwater (Puffimis major, Faber) in Tiree. — Mr. Peter 

 Anderson of Tiree sent me for identification the head of a Great 

 Shearwater, which he had found on the 14th or 15th of October 

 last "about 200 yards from the sea, and was all battered with rain 

 and eaten by gulls. General plumage brown above and white below." 

 As this species has been much confounded in the past with the Sooty 

 Shearwater (P. griseus), satisfactory records of this bird for Scotland 

 are very few ; indeed, the Tiree specimen is, perhaps, the third 

 Scotch one about whose identity there can be no doubt. Mr. 

 Anderson sent at the same time the head of a Fork-tailed Petrel 

 (Cyz/wc/iorea kucorrhod), also from Tiree. — J. A. Harvie-Brown, 

 Dunipace, Larbert. 



Unusual numbers of the Fork -Tailed Petrel (Cymochorea 

 kucorrhoa, Vieill) on the Scottish Coasts. — The latter part of 

 September 1891 will long be remembered on account of the 

 succession of severe gales which blew across our Islands from 

 the North Atlantic. The 26th and 28th were particularly stormy 

 days, the wind blowing with hurricane force from the west or 

 north-west. As a consequence many birds which make the wide 

 Atlantic their winter home, or use it as a highway during passage 

 from their summer to their winter haunts, were caught in the 

 tempests and driven upon our western shores — numbers being 



