SHEATHBILL 831 
by their daily passage up and down the strait, in numerous flocks, 
hardly ever alighting on the surface, and from this restless habit 
they are known to the French-speaking part of the population as 
dmes damnées, it being held by the Turks that they are animated 
by condemned human souls. Four species of Puffinus are recorded 
as visiting the coasts of the United Kingdom; but the Manx 
Shearwater aforesaid is the only one that at present is known to 
occur commonly or breed in the British Islands. It is a very 
plain-looking bird, black above and white beneath, and about the 
size of a Pigeon. Some other species are considerably larger, 
while some are smaller, and of the former several are almost whole- 
coloured, being of a sooty or dark cinereous hue both above and 
below. All over the world Shearwaters seem to have precisely 
the same habits, laying their single purely white egg in a hole 
under ground. The young are thickly clothed with long down, 
and are extremely fat. In this condition they are thought to be 
good eating, and enormous numbers have been caught for this 
purpose in some localities, especially of a species commonly known 
as the MutTron-BirD, P. brevicauda, which used to frequent the 
islands off the coast of Australia; but is probably meeting if it 
has not already met the fate of its congener P. audubont in Ber- 
muda, where the latter was known as the “Cahow ” (variously spelt) 
and was once abundant.! 
SHEATHBILL, a bird so-called in 1781 by Pennant (Gen. B. 
ed. 2, p. 43) from the horny case ? which ensheathes the basal part 
1 Details of the mournful and instructive story of the almost complete 
annihilation of this species on those islands can be gathered from Lefroy’s 
Memorials &c. of the Bermudas or Somers Islands (i. pp. 18, 18, 35, 36, 76, 
137, 330, 331; ii. p. 578), where many extracts, chiefly from Purchas’s Pil- 
grimes and Smith’s Virginia, are given. The swine, let loose in early days 
by the original Spanish discoverers, produced the usual effect, but the birds 
still abounded on the smaller islets, where there were no hogs, and in 1614 
(apparently) the settlers being reduced to distress by famine and fever, the 
English Governor sent 150 of the ‘‘most weake and sicke”’ to Couper’s Isle, 
where were ‘‘infinite numbers of Birds called Cahowes.” But through the 
‘hunger and gluttony” of these poor people ‘‘ those heavenly blessings they 
so much consumed and wasted by carelessness and surfeiting”’ that many died. 
The next Governor, in 1616 apparently, had to issue ‘‘a Proclamation against 
the spoile of Cahowes, but it came too late, for they were most destroyed before.” 
Almost all knowledge of such a bird in the colony had vanished according to 
Mr. J. M. Jones (Nat. in Bermuda, pp. 94-96) when, in 1849, Sir John 
Campbell-Orde and a brother-officer visited the Black Rock, near Cooper’s 
Island, and found three birds, the sole remnant of those that had once crowded 
every available part of the group. In 1874 Capt. Reid (Zool. 1877, p. 491) 
found two nests, and considered that a few pairs of the birds still frequented the 
islands. How many may be there now I know not. 
2 A strange fallacy arose early, and of course has been repeated late, that 
this case or sheath was movable. It is absolutely fixed. 
