SHEATHBILL 831 



by their daily passage up and down the strait, in numerous flocks, 

 hardly ever alighting on the surface, and from this restless habit 

 they are known to the French-speaking part of the population as 

 cimes damndes, it being held by the Turks that they are animated 

 by condemned human souls. Four species of Puffimis are recorded 

 as visiting the coasts of the United Kingdom ; but the Manx 

 Shearwater aforesaid is the only one that at present is known to 

 occur commonly or breed in the British Islands. It is a very 

 plain-looking bird, black above and white beneath, and about the 

 size of a Pigeon. Some other species are considerably larger, 

 while some are smaller, and of the former several are almost whole- 

 coloured, being of a sooty or dark cinereous hue both above and 

 below. All over the world Shearwaters seem to have precisely 

 the same habits, laying their single purely white egg in a hole 

 under ground. The young are thickly clothed with long down, 

 and are extremely fat. In this condition they are thought to be 

 good eating, and enormous numbers have been caught for this 

 purpose in some localities, especially of a species commonly known 

 as the Mutton-bird, P. hrevicauda, which used to frequent the 

 islands off the coast of Australia ; but is probably meeting if it 

 has not already met the fate of its congener P. auduboni in Ber- 

 muda, where the latter was known as the "Cahow " (variously spelt) 

 and was once abundant.^ 



SHEATHBILL, a bird so-called in 1781 by Pennant (Gen. B. 

 ed. 2, p. 43) from the horny case ^ which ensheathes the basal part 



^ Details of the mournful and instructive story of the almost complete 

 annihilation of this species on those islands can be gathered from Lefroy's 

 Memorials dsc. of the Bermudas or Somers Islands (i. pp. 13, 18, 35, 36, 76, 

 137, 330, 331 ; ii. p. 578), where many extracts, chiefly from Purchas's Pil- 

 grimes and Smith's Virginia, are given. The swine, let loose in early days 

 by the original Spanish discoverers, produced the usual effect, but the birds 

 still abounded on the smaller islets, where there were no hogs, and in 1614 

 (apparently) the settlers being reduced to .distress by famine and fever, the 

 English Governor sent 150 of the " most weake and sicke" to Couper's Isle, 

 where were "infinite numbers of Birds called Cahowes." But through the 

 "hunger and gluttony" of these poor people "those heavenly blessings they 

 so much consumed and wasted by carelessness and surfeiting " that many died. 

 The next Governor, in 1616 apparently, had to issue "a Proclamation against 

 tlie spoile of Cahowes, but it came too late, for they were most destroyed before." 

 Almost all knowledge of such a bird in the colony had vanished according to 

 Mr. J. M. Jones [Nat. in Bermuda, pp. 94-96) when, in 1849, Sir John 

 Campbell-Orde and a Lrother-ofBcer visited the Black Rock, near Cooper's 

 Island, and found three birds, the sole remnant of those that had once crowded 

 every available part of the group. In 1874 Capt. Reid {Zool. 1877, p. 491) 

 found two nests, and considered that a few pairs of the birds still frequented the 

 islands. How many may be there now I know not. 



" A strange fallacy arose early, and of course has been repeated late, that 

 this case or sheath was movable. It is absolutely fixed. 



