569 
Family DIOMEDEID i. 
BLACK-BROWED ALBATROSS. Diomedea melanophrys 
(Boie). 
This bird, abundant in the Southern Oceans, and 
breeding on many of the islands of the Antipodes, has on 
several occasions wandered to latitudes even north! of the 
British Isles. But as a British species it has been only 
once recorded. An exhausted specimen was captured near 
Linton in Cambridgeshire, on July 9th, 1897 (‘ Ibis,’ 1897, 
p. 625). ‘* Mr. Southwell has neatly remarked that after all 
the species was only revisiting the haunts of its remote 
ancestors, for the bones of an Albatross of medium size, from 
the Suffolk ‘red crag,’ near Ipswich, have been described 
and figured by Mr. R. Lydekker ” (Saunders). 
DESCRIPTIVE CHARACTERS. 
PLUMAGE. Adult male nuptial—Head, neck, breast, and 
abdomen, white ; over the eye there is a dark bluish-black 
stripe; scapulars and wings, very dark brown; middle of 
the back, light greyish-brown ; tail-feathers, slate-grey, with 
white shafts; under wing-coverts, white; a wide greyish- 
black border extends along the edges of the wing. 
Adult female nuptial.—Similar to the male plumage. 
Adult winter, male and female——Similar to the nuptial 
plumage. 
Immature.—Resembles the adult plumage. 
' Tt is interesting to note that north of our Isles this species has been 
recorded of recent years as follows:—(1) A specimen shot near Myg- 
ganaes, in the Faroes, in 1893, the bird having frequented that Island for 
some thirty or forty years (Saunders). 
(2) An Albatross, probably of this species, observed about twenty 
miles off the Orkneys, on June 18th, 1894, and another shot at sea on 
the Faroe banks, about seventy or eighty miles south-west of Thorshavn 
in 1900 (Harvie- Brown). 
