484 LARiD.f:. 



Mr. Heysliam has noticed one on the coast of Cumber- 

 land, an adult female, which allowed herself to be seized 

 while she was in the act of killing a Herring Gull. Mr. 

 Thompson includes the Common Skua among the visiters to 

 Ireland, and it has been shot on the Severn, in Cornwall, and 

 in Devonshire. 



In this species the bill and its cere are black ; irides dark 

 brown ; the whole of the head and neck dark umber-brown, 

 slightly varied by streaks of reddish-brown ; back, wings, and 

 tail dark brown ; scapulars and tertials margined with pale 

 reddish-brown ; wing primaries blackish-brown, rusty brown- 

 ish-white at the base ; the two middle tail-feathers a little 

 longer, and rather darker in colour than the others ; chin, 

 throat, neck in front, breast, and all the under surface of the 

 body uniform clove-brown ; legs, toes, and their membranes 

 black ; the tarsi scutellated in front, reticulated behind ; the 

 inner claw the strongest and the most curved. The whole 

 length twenty-four to twenty-five inches ; the wing from the 

 anterior bend sixteen inches. 



The female is rather smaller than the male, but otherwise 

 the sexes do not differ much in appearance ; nor does this 

 species assume by age the lighter colours peculiar to the 

 other species of this genus. G. T. Fox, Esq., says of one 

 example which had been kept alive ten years, that the plum- 

 age had undergone no change of colour at any of the annual 

 moultings. A specimen brought to Dr. Neill in the summer 

 of 1820, then a nestling, was alive in 1832 at the Cannon- 

 mills. This bird, Mr. Selby observes, preferred mutton to 

 fish, and, when irritated, or preparing to attack, would raise 

 the feathers of the neck in the manner of a Qame-cock. 



