FORTH RECORD OF THE LEVANTINE SHEARWATER 249 



THE FIRTH OF FORTH RECORD OF THE 

 LEVANTINE SHEARWATER. 



By William Evans, F.R.S.E., M.B.O.U. 



In several recent publications one meets with the bare 

 statement that the Levantine Shearwater {Puffiuus puffiniis 

 yelkoiian) has been recorded for Scotland, namely, from the 

 " Firth of Forth." ^ As the authority for the record, and the 

 details of the occurrence do not appear to be generally 

 known, it seems desirable to give publicity to the facts of 

 the case in the pages of the Scottish Naturalist. Shortly 

 they are as follows : — The specimen was shot by the late 

 E. T. Booth, on 19th August 1874, at the mouth of the 

 Firth of Forth (without doubt, as I shall presently show, 

 somewhere between the Bass Rock and the Isle of May), 

 and is preserved in the Booth Museum, Brighton. Booth 

 regarded it as an immature example of our Manx Shearwater 

 {P. p. puffiuus = P. angloruui)^ and it was left to Howard 

 Saunders to recognise it as belonging to the Levantine sub- 

 species. This identification appeared in the supplement to 

 the third edition of the Catalogue of the Booth Museum, 

 and thence was gleaned into British Birds (magazine) for 

 February 1910 (vol. iii., p. 295). 



First-hand information regarding the occurrence is to be 

 found in Booth's important work, Rough Notes on the Birds 

 observed durifig Twcuty Years' Shootiug in the British Islands, 

 part xii., 1886. Under the heading " Manx Shearwater," we 

 there learn that on 14th August 1874, during a gale from the 

 north-east, the author saw parties of Shearwaters from the 

 May till within about a couple of miles of the Bass (on one 

 or two occasions only had he ever seen any between the 

 Rock and the shore). They were seen also on the 15th 

 beyond the Bass. On the 19th, when the weather was fine, 

 he was out again, clearly in the same waters, and met with 

 small parties of from two or three to a dozen. On this 

 occasion he " procured two or three with perfectly white 



^ See, for instance, A Handbook of British Birds, 191 2, and the new 

 edition of the B.O.U. List. - " • 





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