258 REV. H. N. BONAR ON 
sheer off. They dodged the oars, and swam between the 
boat and the carcase as if they had never seen a man before. 
One of the sailors caught one by simply reaching out his 
hand to the surface of the water as he sat in the boat. 
This was the only occasion on which I heard their note— 
a kind of chuckling noise. But the matter of greatest 
interest was that here were quite a dozen of the white- 
coloured specimens which are so rare in Spitsbergen. Mr 
Trevor Battye (naturalist to Sir Martin Conway’s expedi- 
tion in 1896) says: “. .. . Of the thousands I saw last 
year, the white parts of not one could be described even 
by courtesy as anything better than a dirty light shade” 
(Ibis, October 1897, p. 596). Our party were fortunate 
enough to get several photographs of the Fulmars round the 
whale showing distinctly the white variety of the bird. It 
seemed to me, looking down on them from the upper deck 
of the steamer as they floated below, that the white- 
breasted birds had not such long wings as the dark ones, 
or if they had, they did not sit on the water with their 
wing feathers crossed as did the others; their wing tips 
seemed just to meet and touch each other over the rump, 
while the wings of the dark-coloured ones overlapped at the 
same spot like a St Andrew’s cross. 
*29, URIA BRUENNICHI, E. Sabine.—Briinnich’s 
Guillemot. 
Seen in thousands, I dare not say millions. I climbed 
up to the great “ Loomery” at the Vogelberg on July 25, 
where, as far as I could note, every egg was hatched. On 
the rank, guano-grown grass below the upper cliffs, I found 
egg-shells and lining membranes everywhere. The birds 
let me approach to within a few feet without moving. 
Some four or five I saw on ledges below me, and I tried 
to make them fly to see whether they had eggs or not. 
But nothing short of killing them could have made those 
birds budge. I threw turf at them, and rolled boulders 
down within three feet of them; they merely turned their 
heads towards me with a look of languid interest, but 
never thought of moving. It was very interesting to see 
