POMATORHINE SKUA. 277 



POMATOEHINE SKUA. 



Stercorarius pomatorhinus. 



I FiND^ in my own notes, the record of an immature example 

 of this Skua, shot at Hangleton by Mr. Hardwick of that 

 place, on October 27th, 1837. In 1841 two more were shot, 

 the one, at Shoreham Harbour, on October 17th, the other, 

 which was immature, at Brighton on November 2nd. The 

 former was moulting, particularly about the head and neck, 

 the long feathers of those parts having lost the greater 

 portion of the straw-coloured tips. 



Mr. Dennis, writing in October 1857, tells me that a 

 piece of flooded ground, near Seaford, was visited by a small 

 flock of Skuas, and that he shot two of this species ; the 

 mouth of one of them was crammed with earth-worms. He 

 also informed me on another occasion that an adult speci- 

 men was shot at Seaford on October 27th, 1858. Yarrell 

 (B. B. vol. iii. p. 668) observes that the first notice of this 

 bird, as British, appears in the Catalogue of Mr. Bullock^s 

 collection, sold in 1819, in which was a specimen said to 

 have been killed at Brighton *. Mr. Knox merely remarks 

 that the species had been shot at Brighton, Shoreham, 

 Bognor, Newhaven, and Hastings. 



Mr. Booth states that numbers are occasionally seen in 

 the Channel, and that during a terrible gale from the south 

 on October 24th, 1852, a small party of Skuas of this 

 species were blown inland at Shoreham, and settled for a 

 time in a stubble field, and that the whole number were in 



* Prof. Newton's annotated copy of this Catalogue shows that the 

 specimen was bought by Dr. Leach for the British Museum, and it is 

 entered in Mr. G. R. Gray's * Catalogue of British Birds ' in that 

 Collection with the locality "North Britain" ! 



