SOOTY SHEARWATER 



22 I 



and in the eastern hemisphere as the Faroes. Up to the year 1900 

 some twenty individuals had been recorded from the British Isles, 

 these occurrences including the south coasts of England as well as 

 Scotland and Ireland ; and other instances were noted in Stromness 

 and the Firth of Forth in 1903. It is jM-obable, however, that this 

 bird is frequently mistaken for the immature condition of the great 

 shearwater, and that it may be an annual, 

 or, at all events, a not unfrcquent visitor 

 to our shores. In its southern breeding- 

 home the sooty shearwater displays, appar- 

 ently, habits very similar to those of the 

 Manx shearwater in the north ; its burrows 

 in the Chatham Islands, Avhich are exca- 

 vated in peaty soil, run, ho\\'ever, horizon- 

 tally for a distance of a yard or so, when 

 they turn suddenly to one side, to terminate 

 in the nest-chamber, which in each case is 

 lined with a slight layer of twigs and grass 

 for the reception of the single white egg^. 

 On certain islands off the southern coast 

 of New Zealand, these birds share their 

 burrows with the tuatera lizard. Here, 

 when the young are nearly ready to fly, 

 the nests are annually raided by the 

 Maories, by whom roast shearwater- chick- 

 is esteemed a special delicac}*. From 

 Stewart Island, where these birds are 

 specially numerous, large numbers of the 

 young are potted and despatched north- 

 ward for consumption by the inland tribes. 



A very brief notice must suffice of four other representatives of 

 the petrels, of which a stray example or so has wandered to the 

 British Isles. The first of these is the capped petrel UJistrcIata 

 h(2sitata), apparently a native of the coasts of Haiti and Martinique, 

 in the West Indies, and a member of a genus, with some thirty 

 species, differing from the shearwaters by the rounded front of the 

 shank of the leg. A single example of this species was taken at 

 Swaffham, Norfolk, in the spring of 1850. Of the second species, 

 known as the collared, or white-throated grey petrel i^CEstrclata 

 brevipes, or torquata), a specimen was taken in Cardigan Bay in the 

 winter of 1889. It is a small bird, measuring only 11^ inches in 



SOOTY SHKAKVVATER. 



