DUSKY PETREL. 661 



coast of Africa to the Cape of Good Hope." And it 

 may be mentioned, in proof of the first part of this state- 

 ment, that the name of this bird does not appear in the 

 catalogues of the birds of Sicily, Malta, Tunis, Algeria, 

 or Tangiers. 



Messrs. Webb and Berthelot include the Puffinus 

 obscurus in their work on the Natural History of the 

 Canary Islands ; and Edward Vernon Harcourt, Esq., to 

 whom I am indebted for a specimen of the bird and its 

 egg, has particularly referred to this species in his published 

 Sketch of Madeira (pp. 122 and 165). Eight or nine 

 species of the birds of this family breed on, or frequent, 

 the Dezertas, a group of small islands about eighteen 

 miles east from Madeira. " The Dusky Petrel is a very 

 tame bird, and will live upon almost anything ; my bird 

 would climb up my trowsers by its beak and claws to ob- 

 tain small portions of food ; it runs along the ground on its 

 belly, and uses its curious -shaped bill in climbing up the 

 rocks. Those I had in my possession alive, were some of 

 them caught with fish-hooks baited with meat, by the 

 Portuguese, and some taken by the hand in the day-time 

 from underneath stones, where they hide from the light." 

 The egg, and they lay but one, measures one inch and 

 seven-eighths in length, by one inch and three-eighths in 

 breadth, rather smaller at one end than at the other, and 

 pure white. 



Audubon, in his Birds of America (vol. vii. p. 216), 

 and in his Ornithological Biography (vol. iii. p. 620), 

 gives an interesting account of the habits of this Petrel 

 on the water : " They skim very low over the sea in 

 search of the floating bunches of marine plants, usually 

 called the gulf weed, so abundant here as sometimes to 

 occupy a space of half an acre or more. On approaching 

 a mass of weeds, they raise their wings obliquely, drop 



