PROCELLARIID.B. 



723 



BULWER'S PETREL. 



BuLWERiA COLUMBINA (Moquin-Tandon). 



The only authentic instance of the occurrence of this species in 

 Great Britain is that of an example found dead on the banks of the 

 Ure near Tanfield in Yorkshire on May 8th 1837, which was brought 

 to Capt. Dalton (son of the Col. Dalton who provided Bewick with 

 the Storm-Petrel figured in his ' British Birds '). This specimen was 

 described and figured by Gould in Pt. xxii. of his ' Birds of Europe ' 

 (1837); but he did not include the species in his 'Birds of Great 

 Britain' (1873) and omitted all mention of his former sponsorship in 

 the Introduction, which made me once suspect that later information 

 had cast some doubt on the statement. However, Messrs. W. Eagle 

 Clarke and James Carter took considerable pains to investigate the 

 matter, and were successful in tracing the identical bird, which is 

 now in the Museum at York, l-'urther details are given in the 

 'Proceedings' of the Zoological Society for 18S7, p. 562, and also 

 in 'The Naturalist' for 1888, p. 156. 



An example in the Leiden Museum is said to have come from 

 Greenland, but Reinhardt informed Mr. P. E. Freke that he thought 

 it might be from one of the Moravian settlements in Labrador ; 

 in any case this bird has seldom been met with beyond the vicinity of 

 the Canaries, IMadeira and Porto Santo. The first published account 

 of it is given by Jardine and Selby (111. Orn. ii. pi. 65), who conferred 

 on it the name oi Procellaria hidweri, after Mr. Bulwer — for some time 

 a resident in Madeira, to whom they were indebted for the specimen 



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