34 THE AUKS 



however, we meet with it again, but only in small numbers, though 

 probably breeding. Low, who died in 1795, writes that he could find 

 no evidence of its presence in the Orkneys, but when Bullock 

 visited the islands in 1812, he was told that for several seasons a male 

 and female had regularly visited Papa Westray. The female had been 

 killed shortly before his arrival, and Bullock made desperate attempts 

 to capture the male, chasing it for many hours together in a six-oared 

 boat. The auk was so quick in diving, and moved so fast under water, 

 that though they frequently got near him, they were quite unable 

 either to shoot or capture him, and the pursuit had to be abandoned. 

 However, subsequently some fishermen managed to catch the un- 

 fortunate bird, which was killed and the body sent to Mr. Bullock, by 

 whom it was in due course transferred to the British Museum. 

 Professor Newton's researches l tend to prove that the breeding-place 

 of these birds was not on Papa Westray, but on the Holm, where 

 there are sloping slabs of rock shelving gently up from the sea, 

 sheltered from the winds and accessible even to flightless birds at all 

 states of the tide. 



The Irish records still remain to be considered. Until com- 

 paratively recently nothing was known of the occurrence of this 

 species in Ireland beyond the immature bird captured in 1844. In 

 the kitchen-middens of White Park Bay, on the Antrim coast, Mr. 

 Knowles found in 1891 and 1895 numerous bones of great-auks, 

 associated with flint implements and shells of edible molluscs. Some 

 were scattered on the surface, and others were obtained by digging 

 (see Proc. Royal Irish Academy, i. No. 5, p. 625 ; iii. No. 4, p. 654 ; and 

 Irish Naturalist, 1899, p. 4). Similarly among the sandhills on Tramore 

 Bay, Co. Waterford, Mr. R. J. Ussher found, in 1897, in different 

 places among the extensive kitchen-middens, no fewer than seventeen 

 bones of the great-auk, representing at least six individual birds. 

 There is no doubt that the birds were used as food by the people who 

 made the kitchen-middens, and it is scarcely possible that so many 



1 Ibis, 1898, p. 587. 



