50 Mr. W. R. Ogilvie Grant on Birch 



their owners to be regarded as suspicious characters. The 

 plumage in both sexes is of course alike ; but the male is 

 decidedly the bigger of the two, and when alive may be easily 

 distinguished by his larger head and thicker neck, though 

 these differences disappear when the bird is skinned. On 

 the wing, too, he looks distinctly larger. 



-j-18. PUFFINUS ASSIMILIS. 



Gould's Little Shearwater, so far as we ascertained, was 

 the only other bird of this genus that visits Great Salvage. 

 At Porto Santo we had already found it breeding plentifully 

 on the Lime Island, and satisfied ourselves that it is this 

 species — and not P. ohscurus — that occurs there. The young 

 birds do not show the white inner webs to the quills clearly, 

 and hence Mr. Salvin and I were both led to believe that 

 the specimens brought back in 1890 (see 'Ibis,-' 1891, p. 469) 

 were the young of P. ohscurus. I recently examined more 

 than a dozen of old birds in Padre Schmitz's collection at 

 Madeira, which had been obtained at Porto Santo, and 

 these were, without exception, typical P. assimilis. At 

 Great Salvage we procured downy young in various stages, 

 and one late egg, almost fresh ; this is large for the size of 

 the bird, and the shell is pure white and perfectly oval in 

 shape, the two poles being equally rounded. We never saw 

 much of these birds. During the daytime there were 

 generally some to be seen at sea, often in company with the 

 Mediterranean Shearwater, and one night an old female flew 

 into our camp attracted by the powerful lantern. Every 

 night our men used to sally forth in pairs, to search for this 

 and other species of Petrels, in their nesting-cavities on the 

 sides of the cliffs — bad enough walking, even in daylight, but 

 no harm came of it. One man carried the lamp (a tin 

 coffee-pot it looked like, filled with kerosene oil, and with a 

 coarse cotton wick protruding from the spout), which gave 

 out a brilliant light, while his companion searched the 

 numerous miniature caves and crevices till he had filled his 

 own and the lamp-bearer's shirts with birds of various kinds. 

 In this way we got several nice adults of this species, which 



