PUBLISHER'S NOTE 



James Fisher is the author of The Fulmar (1952); and R. M. Lockley, 

 author of Shearwaters (1949), has just pubhshed Puffins (1953). There 

 could, in fact; hardly be any other pair of authors better qualified to 

 describe the sea-birds of the North Atlantic than these with their 

 experience of many years of field work and visits along the coast 

 and islands, from Spitsbergen and Iceland in the cool north, to 

 Madeira and the Salvages in the warm south, of that great demi- 

 ocean. They have made their visits often together, often separately, 

 and lived much on the small remote islands where sea-birds breed. 



The North Atlantic, busiest ocean in the world, is revealed in the 

 opening chapters not as a monotonous watery plain, but as an intri- 

 cately varied, densely inhabited foraging ground for sea-birds. This 

 avian community, though remarkably homogeneous in difierent 

 sections of the broad expanse of the North Atlantic, is fascinating in 

 the variety of the species that compose it, and in the complexity of their 

 movements and migrations. The annual migrations of some species 

 extend the total range of the community from the arctic to the antarctic. 

 These long transatlantic migrations, verified by ringing, take species 

 from east to west between Europe and North America, and from north 

 to south between Greenland and South Africa, Britain and South 

 America. 



The authors tell us of the primitive progenitors of the sea-birds, 

 dating from over sixty million years ago, and the evolutionary adven- 

 tures of their descendants, including the notorious extinction of the 

 strange flightless great auk, the sad decline of many other fine species, 

 also the rediscovery of the cahow after it had been presumed extinct. 

 They have paid special attention to geographical distribution, and 

 have provided a unique collection of maps, giving us, for the first time, 

 the distribution of most species of North Atlantic sea-birds. 



Chief among the authors' interests has been the study of sea-bird 

 numbers. They were largely responsible for organising the surveys 

 of that splendid and typical North Atlantic animal, the gannet, which 



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