752 PUKRAS 
seen. But it had long been known to some observers that such 
Puffins as occasionally occur in winter (most often dead and washed 
up on the shore) presented a beak very different in shape and 
size, and to account for the difference was a standing puzzle. 
Many years ago Bingley (North Wales, i. p. 354) stated that Puffins 
“are said to change their bills annually.” The remark seems to 
have been generally overlooked ; but it has proved to be very near 
the truth, for after investigations carefully pursued during some 
years by Dr. Bureau of Nantes he was in 1877 enabled to shew 
(Bull. Soc. Zool. France, ii. pp. 377-399)! that the Puffin’s bill 
undergoes an annual MOULT, some of its most remarkable appen- 
dages, as well as certain horny outgrowths above and beneath the 
eyes, dropping off at the end of the breeding-season, and being 
reproduced the following year. Not long after the same naturalist 
announced (op. cit. iv. pp. 1-68) that he had followed the similar 
changes which he found to take place, not only in other species of 
Puffins, as the Fratercula corniculata and F. cirrhata of the Northern 
Pacific, but in several birds of the kindred genera Cerorhyncha, the 
Horn-billed AUK, and Simorhynchus inhabiting the same waters, and 
consequently proposed to regard all of them as forming a Family 
distinct from the Alcide—a view which has since found favour 
with Dr. Dybowski (op. cit. vii. pp. 270-800 and viii. pp. 348-350), 
though there is apparently insufficient reason for accepting it. 
The name Puffin has also been given in books to one of the 
SHEARWATERS, and its Latinized form Puffinus is still used in that 
sense in scientific nomenclature. This fact seems to have arisen 
from a mistake of Ray’s, who, seeing in Tradescant’s Museum and 
that of the Royal Society some young Shearwaters from the Isle of 
Man, prepared in like manner to young Puffins, thought they were 
the birds mentioned by Gesner (Joc. cit.), as the remarks inserted in 
Willughby’s Ornithologia (p. 251) prove ; for the specimens described 
by Ray were as clearly Shearwaters as Gesner’s were Puffins. 
PUKRAS, from its name in one of the dialects in the North- 
western Himalaya, a species of PHEASANT (well-known to Anglo- 
Indian sportsmen, by whom it is also called the “ Koklas”), the 
Pucrasia macrolopha of most ornithologists. The cock is remarkable 
for his very long ear-tufts of glossy black, which contrast with the 
large spot of pure white on each side of the neck; but the rest of 
his plumage is comparatively unobtrusive, while the hen, as usual 
among the Pheasants, is very plainly coloured. Beside a local 
form which seems to be peculiar to Cashmere and Gilgit, Mr. 
1 A translated abstract of this paper—containing an account of what is per- 
haps the most interesting discovery of the kind made in Ornithology for many 
years—is given in the Zoologist for 1878 (pp. 233-240) and another in the Bulletin 
of the Nuttall Ornithological Club for the same year (iii. pp. 87-91). 
