PETREL 



709 



Petrels are dispersed throughout all the seas and oceans of the 

 world, and some species apparently never resort to land except for 

 the purpose of nidification, though nearly all are liable at times to 

 be driven ashore, and often very far inland, by gales of Avind.^ 



Capped Petrel, (Estrelata hxsitata. (Prom The Zoologist, vol. x. p. 3603.) 



Wanderers as they may be, there is reason to think that attachment 

 to their home is a feeling as strong with them as with other birds, 

 and it is only now beginning to l)e clear that until we IcnoAv the 

 breeding-place or places of each species — and some seem to be 

 extremely restricted in this respect — we shall know very little to 

 the point about their geographical distribution. But this knowledge 

 is not easily obtained, for during the breeding-season many of these 

 birds are almost wholly nocturnal in their habits, passing the day 

 in holes of the ground, or in clefts of the rocks, in which they 

 generally nestle, the hen of each pair laying a single Avhite egg, 

 s^mrsely speckled in a few species with fine reddish dots. Of those 

 species that frequent the North Atlantic, the common Storm-Petrel, 

 FroceUaria pelagica, a little bird which has to the ordinary eye rather 

 the look of a Swift or Swallow, is the " Mother Carey's chicken " of 



249-257; and Zoology, Voy. ^Challenger,' pt. viii. pp. 140-149); and the 

 distribution of the group in the Southern Ocean is treated by Prof. A. Milne- 

 Edwards {Ann. Sc. Nat. 1882, Zool. ser. 6, xiii. art. 4 ; Germanice, Alitth. 

 Ornith. Vcr. in Wien, 1884). 



^ Thus (Estrelata hsesitata, the Capped Petrel, a species whose proper home 

 seems to have been in Guadeloupe and Dominica (where it was known as the 

 " Diablotin "), has even occurred in the State of Xew York, near Boulogne, in 

 Norfolk and in Hungary {Ihis, 1884, p. 202) ! But there is reason to fear that 

 this species is nearly extinct, though an example is recorded {Auh, 1893, p. 361) 

 in Virginia, some 200 miles from the sea, in August 1893, two days after a great 

 storm, while its congener, CE. jamaicensis, runs a risk of the same fate (see Exter- 

 mination, p. 227, note 4). 



