486 THE GANNET 



those of the tail and wings, and no irregularity was noted 

 in the casting of the primaries.* Besides the moult, there 

 was evidently a constant wearing away of the barbules 

 and barbicels of most, or all, of the feathers. A young 

 Gannet, the property of the Zoological Society, examined 

 on November 25th, 1911, when it was lent to me by the 

 Society, being then, as was beheved, eighteen months old, 

 showed many new feathers coming upon the back ; but 

 there were no shed feathers in its enclosure (although care- 

 ful search was made then and on subsequent days), which 

 there would have been if it had been in moult. It died 

 on January 5th, 1912, when the opportunity was taken of 

 submitting one of the wings to Mr. C. B. Ticehurst, who 

 made a minute examination of the secondary-quills, which 



* Whether they were actually shed m pairs, I am not sure. Mr. C. B. 

 Ticehurst, to whose notes I am much indebted in tliis work, describing 

 a Gannet obtained in Suffolk, on October 5th, 1911, writes that the 

 primaries seemed to be cast very slowly, and not in an orderly fashion, 

 the two outer feathers being old ones, and the third in quill, the fifth 

 and sixth old ones, the rest new. The secondaries in this specimen, he 

 adds, were not regixlar or even the same in the two wings ; in the left one 

 the twelfth and fourteenth feathers were in the quill, while in the right wing 

 the seventh only, some of the remainder being new and some old. The 

 tail was irregular, but the same on both sides. It appears from Mr. 

 J. L. Bonhote's observations that the Cormorant moults in November 

 and April, and that the primary -quills in this species are not cast in both 

 wings synclironously (" The Field," Nov. 27th, 1909). That there is a 

 regvilar order in which feathers drop out in most birds is clear, and this 

 is conspicuously the case in the Partridge (L. Bureau, " Rev. Frang 

 d'Ornithologie," 1910, p. 209). 



