PETREL 709 
Petrels are dispersed throughout all the seas and oceans of the 
world, and some species apparently never resort to land except for 
the purpose of nidification, though nearly all are liable at times to 
be driven ashore, and often very far inland, by gales of wind.1 
CapreD PETREL, Zistrelata hesitata. (From The Zoologist, vol. x. p. 3693.) ~ 
Wanderers as they may be, there is reason to think that attachment 
to their home is a feeling as strong with them as with other birds, 
and it is only now beginning to be clear that until we know the 
breeding-place or places of each species—and some seem to be 
extremely restricted in this respect—we shall know very little to 
the point about their geographical distribution. But this knowledge 
is not easily obtained, for during the breeding-season many of these 
birds are almost wholly nocturnal in their habits, passing the day 
in holes of the ground, or in clefts of the rocks, in which they 
generally nestle, the hen of each pair laying a single white egg, 
sparsely speckled in a few species with fine reddish dots. Of those 
species that frequent the North Atlantic, the common Storm-Petrel, 
Procellaria pelagica, a little bird which has to the ordinary eye rather 
the look of a Swift or Swallow, is the “ Mother Carey’s chicken ” of 
249-257; and Zoology, Voy. ‘Challenger,’ pt. viii. pp. 140-149); and the 
distribution of the group in the Southern Ocean is treated by Prof. A. Milne- 
Edwards (Ann. Se. Nat. 1882, Zool. ser. 6, xiii. art. 4; Germanice, Mitth. 
Ornith. Ver. in Wien, 1884). 
1 Thus @strelatu hexsitata, the Capped Petrel, a species whose proper home 
seems to have been in Guadeloupe and Dominica (where it was known as the 
**Diablotin ”), has even occurred in the State of New York, near Boulogne, in 
Norfolk and in Hungary (Jbis, 1884, p. 202)! But there is reason to fear that 
this species is nearly extinct, though an example is recorded (d4uk, 1893, p. 361) 
in Virginia, some 200 miles from the sea, in August 1893, two days after a great 
storm, while its congener, @. jamaicensis, runs a risk of the same fate (see Exrer- 
MINATION, p. 227, note 4). 
