752 PUKRAS 



seen. But it had long been known to some observers that such 

 Puflfins as occasionally occur in winter (most often dead and washed 

 up on the shore) presented a beak very different in shape and 

 size, and to account for the difference was a standing puzzle. 

 Many years ago Bingley {North Wales, i. p. 354) stated that Puffins 

 "are said to change their bills annually." The remark seems to 

 have been generally overlooked ; but it has proved to be very near 

 the truth, for after investigations carefully pursued during some 

 years by Dr. Bureau of Nantes he was in 1877 enabled to shew 

 {Bull Soc. Zool. France, ii. pp. 377-399)^ that the Puffin's bill 

 undergoes an annual MOULT, some of its most remarkable appen- 

 dages, as well as certain horny outgrowths above and beneath the 

 eyes, dropping oft' at the end of the breeding-season, and being 

 reproduced the following year. Not long after the same naturalist 

 announced {op. cit. iv. pp. 1-68) that he had followed the similar 

 changes which he found to take place, not only in other species of 

 Puffins, as the Fratercula corniculata and F. cirrhata of the Northern 

 Pacific, but in several birds of the kindred genera Cerorhyncha, the 

 Horn-billed Auk, and Simorhijnchus inhabiting the same waters, and 

 consequently proposed to regard all of them as forming a Family 

 distinct from the Alcidx — a view which has since found favour 

 with Dr. Dybowski {op. cit. vii. pp. 270-300 and viii. pp. 348-350), 

 though there is apparently insufficient reason for accepting it. 



The name Puffin has also been given in books to one of the 

 Shearwaters, and its Latinized form Puffinus is still used in that 

 sense in scientific nomenclature. This fact seems to have arisen 

 from a mistake of Ray's, who, seeing in Tradescant's Museum and 

 that of the Royal Society some young Shearwaters from the Isle of 

 Man, prepared in like manner to young Puffins, thought they were 

 the birds mentioned by Gesner {loc. cit.), as the remarks inserted in 

 Willughby's Ornithologia (p. 251) prove ; for the specimens described 

 by Ray were as clearly Shearwaters as Gesner's were Puffins. 



PUKRAS, from its name in one of the dialects in the North- 

 Avestern Himalaya, a species of Pheasant (well-known to Anglo- 

 Indian sportsmen, by whom it is also called the " Koklas "), the 

 Pucrasia macrolopha of most ornithologists. The cock is remarkable 

 for his very long ear-tufts of glossy black, which contrast with the 

 large spot of pure white on each side of the neck ; but the rest of 

 his plumage is comparatively unobtrusive, while the hen, as usual 

 among the Pheasants, is very plainly coloured. Beside a local 

 form which seems to be peculiar to Cashmere and Gilgit, Mr. 



^ A translated abstract of this paper — containing an account of what is per- 

 haps the most interesting discovery of the kind made in Ornithology for many 

 years — is given in the Zoologist for 1878 (pp. 233-240) and another in the Bulletin 

 of Uie Nuttall Ornithological Club for the same year (iii. pp. 87-01). 



