94 EDWARD A. WILSON. 



as " great piles of small angular stones .... about two feet in diameter." The first 

 eggs were here laid, very rarely more than one in a nest, on November 4th, and the 

 average length of eighty eggs was 10 '38 cm., and the breadth 6 '57 cm. There is 

 also in this account an interesting note which I quote below, upon the proportion of 

 the white, dark, and intermediate phases. Plate XL, Fig. 2, in the 'Ibis' for 

 January, 1906, shows an exceedingly happy photograph of the white phase of this 

 bird with its nest and egg. 



Ossifraga feeds mainly upon carrion, though its character is not above suspicion 

 in the matter of attacking living animals. In one case, at any rate, the evidence 

 of its having attacked man in the water is hardly open to doubt ; I quote Mr. Howard 

 Saunders, who writes : " Mr. Arthur G. Guillemard states that a sailor who was picked up 

 had his arms badly lacerated in defending his head from the attacks of an 'albatross,' which 

 may well have been this Giant Petrel." Mr. Eagle Clarke also, in his " Account of the 

 Birds of Gough Island" (' Ibis,' April, 1905, p. 263), tells us that according to Mr. Comer, 

 it carries off young Penguins to eat, and pulls Petrels from their burrows in the ground. 



We constantly saw it feeding upon seals' blubber, dead penguins, and any other 

 animal refuse that happened to lie in its way, but we ourselves never saw any living 

 animal attacked ; and although Mr. Eagle Clarke mentions " abundant remains of 

 recently killed young penguins" in their rookeries in the South Orkneys, he says 

 nothing in this case to prevent one from believing that the birds merely picked up the 

 remains of what the Skuas had killed, or of birds that had succumbed to climatic causes. 



The habit that this bird has, in common with most of the petrels, of disgorging 

 semi-digested food when disturbed or annoyed is very commonly seen in putting it to 

 flight after feeding. It is interesting to notice how small an amount of such ballast 

 removed by vomiting seems to turn the scale, for it is quite insignificant when 

 compared with what the stomach actually contains ; yet the bird seems so utterly 

 unable to run or to rise from the ice until relieved, that, no matter how closely it is 

 pressed, it will come to a dead stop in order to disencumber itself by a number of 

 voluntary efforts before making a serious effort to rise. The weight of the bird and 

 the length of its wings necessitate a considerable run on the icefloe in any case before 

 this can be effected. On one occasion the footmarks (fig. 43, p. 94) of a rising Ossifraga, 

 seen on a drifting ice-floe from the ship, created quite a small sensation ; from a 

 distance they looked much like the footprints of some gigantic mammal. 



The relative distribution of the various phases of this bird is a point to which a 

 good deal of attention was paid throughout the course of our voyage. By making 

 a rough estimate daily of the number of birds that we saw of this species, and notes as 

 to their colouring, we came to the conclusion that the white form, although seen from 

 time to time in the more temperate region of the Southern Oceans, is really very much 

 more abundant, both absolutely and relatively, in the ice. And not only this, but that 

 the abundance of the intermediate forms has also some relation to locality and climatic 

 differences. 



