202 



AUK GROUP 



of such a designation is foreign to the plan of the present work, it has 

 been necessary to revive an alternative specific name ; the original 

 Linna^an specific name being, of course, preserved in the higher grade 

 of a generic title. 



Although essentially a bird of the open Arctic ocean, the rotche is 

 a winter-visitor to the British Isles and the shores of the North Sea 

 and North Atlantic in general, occasionally wandering as far south as 



the Azores and Canaries, and 

 on the American side reaching 

 the coast of New England. 

 The visitations of the rotche 

 to Great Britain are, however, 

 subject to great fluctuations in 

 point of numbers ; and in 

 unusually cold seasons great 

 numbers of these birds often 

 arrive on our shores, the last 

 of these great visitations hav- 

 ing occurred in the winter of 

 1894-95. The strange thing 

 about these visitations — in the 

 case of a species accustomed to 

 the vicissitudes of an Arctic 

 climate — is, however, that in 

 unusually bad weather numbers 

 of these birds are often driven 

 far inland, when, as in the winter 

 above cited, many are picked 

 up dead. The present writer 

 when a boy not unfrequently 

 saw such a storm-beaten straggler which was captured many years ago 

 on the mill-head in the village of Wheathampstead, near St. Albans, and 

 was long in the collection of the late Mr. Thrale, a farmer-collector 

 living at No-man's-land, a couple of miles distant from the village. 

 With the sale of that collection the history of the specimen ends. 

 To Ireland the species is a rare and irregular winter-visitor, being 

 apparently in most cases driven there b}' stress of weather. Franz 

 Josef Land, Novaia Zemlia, Spitzbcrgen, the north of Iceland, and 

 Greenland nearly as far north as latitude 79", are well-known and 

 favourite breeding-places of the rotche. 



It is time, however, to mention some of the leading distinctive 



LITTLK AUKS, OK ROTCHF.S. 



