430 



PETREL. 



interest. One other species, and only one, has been 

 seen in this country 



The Sooty Puffin (P. fuliginosus). It is under- 

 stood to have its proper home at the very antipodes ; 

 and, therefore, the one which appeared at the mouth 

 of the Tees in 1828 was a stranger indeed. 



THALASSIDROMA. Clever as the puffins are in 

 their action upon the waters, they are nothing com- 

 pared to the storm petrels, or members of the present 

 Bubgenus. These are small birds, of dark colours, 

 though sometimes there is a little white upon them, and 

 they resemble the swallow tribe, both in colour and in 

 the style and rapidity of their flight. Their dwelling 

 is more exclusively upon the water than that of even 

 the most seaward of the former sub-genus ; and they 

 drive about so much, and so incessantly, that it is not 

 easy to say in what particular parts of the ocean 

 they have what may be called their resting-places. 



There are several species of the genus, but they 

 all resemble each other very much in appearance, 

 and still more in habits. In calm weather they 

 remain comparatively quiet, each seeking its own 

 food ; but in severe storms they endeavour to find 

 shelter, and it is on these occasions that they crowd 

 so much about ships. As they accompany the storm, 

 and sometimes outstrip it in their flight from it, so as 

 to arrive at the ships before it, the sailors look upon 

 it with no small degree of apprehension. They are 

 known at sea as Mother Carey's chickens, among 

 many other names not of the most flattering cast ; 

 and this Mother Carey is understood to have been a 

 hag who caused an immense number of shipwrecks in 

 the days of the belief in witchcraft, not only by her 

 supposed influence with the " Prince of the Power of 

 the Air," but by lighting false watchfires on the 

 heights, as used often to be done upon those coasts 

 where the infamous system existed. 



The common Storm Pctrel\(T. pelagica) is the one 

 most frequently met with. It is about five inches and 

 a half in length, but rather more than fifteen in the 

 stretch of the wings ; the bill is about half an inch 

 long, and rather slender ; the nail on the upper man- 

 dible is nearly straight, and the nasal -tube is very 

 short : the upper plumage is smooth glossy black, 

 with bluish reflections, and the under plumage is very 

 deep blackish-brown ; there are, however, some white 

 feathers on the rump, the tips of the greater wing- 

 coverts, and some of the primary wings. The nests 

 are understood to be made in holes of tall cliffs, but, 

 as the birds fly in and out with great rapidity, the 

 nests are not often discovered. The eggs are two in 

 number, which is double that of the petrels and 

 puffins. Notwithstanding this double produce, as 

 compared with the others, it does not appear that 

 the storm petrels are nearly so numerous ; and there 

 is no doubt that it is their exposure to the severity of 

 the weather which thins their numbers. The violent 

 storms not only blow them about like chaff on the 

 surface of the ocean, but they are often driven from 

 inland, where they are left in a state of the greatest 

 exhaustion. 



Wilson has given by far the best description of the 

 very characteristic manners of these birds, and as he 

 has given it from his personal observation, to alter it 

 would be any thing but to improve it. When sailing 

 from New Orleans to New York, " on entering," 

 says Wilson, " the gulf stream, and passing along 

 the coasts of Florida and the Carolinas, these birds 

 made their appearance in great numbers, and in all 



weathers, contributing much, by their sprightly evo- 

 lutions of wing, to enliven the scene, and affording me 

 every day several hours of amusement. It is indeed 

 an interesting sight to observe these little birds in a 

 gale, coursing over the waves, down the declivities 

 up the ascents of the foaming surf that threatens tc 

 burst over their heads, sweeping along the hollow 

 troughs of the sea, as in a sheltered valley, and agair 

 mounting with the rising billow, and just above its 

 surface, occasionally dropping its feet, which striking 

 the water, throws it up again with additional force 

 sometimes leaping with both legs parallel on the sur- 

 face of the roughest waves for several yards at a time, 

 Meanwhile it continues coursing from side to side ol 

 the ship's wake, making excursions far and wide, to the 

 right and to the left, now a great way ahead, and now 

 shooting astern for several hundred yards, returning 

 again to the ship as if she were all the while station- 

 ary, though perhaps running at the rate of ten knots 

 an hour. But the most singular peculiarity of this 

 bird is its faculty of standing and even running on the 

 surface of the water, which it performs with apparent 

 facility. When any greasy matter is thrown over- 

 board, these birds instantly collect around it, and, 

 facing to windward, with their long wings expanded, 

 and their webbed feet patting the water, the light- 

 ness of their bodies and the action of the wind on 

 their wings enable them to do this with case. In 

 calm weather, they perform the same manoeuvre, by 

 keeping their wings just so much in action as to pre- 

 vent their feet from sinking below the surface." " As 

 these birds," he continues, " often come up immedi- 

 ately under the stern, one can examine their form 

 and plumage with nearly as much accuracy as if they 

 were in the hand. They fly with the wings forming an 

 almost straight horizontal line with the body, the legs 

 extended behind, and the feet partly seen stretching 

 beyond the tail. Their common note of wect, wcet, 

 is scarcely louder than that of a young chick of a 

 week old, and much resembling it. During the whole 

 of a dark, wet, and boisterous night, which I spent on 

 deck, they flew about the after-rigging, making a sin- 

 gular hoarse chattering which, in sound, resembled 

 the syllables protrct-tu-cuk-cuk-tu-tu, laying the accent 

 strongly on the second syllable tret. Now and then 

 I conjectured that they alighted on the rigging, 

 making then a lower curring noise." 



We regret that we have no more room for quota- 

 tion, and we do this the more that the hints contained 

 in Wilson's observations tend to throw more light 

 upon the real characters and economy of these birds 

 than all else that has been written on the subject. 

 He found them in the gulf stream, which shows 

 that they seek the water where it is moving along, 

 and bearing with it those substances upon which they 

 feed. He found the remains of a large fish in the 

 stomach of one, and another filled with tallow which 

 he himself had thrown overboard ; in the gizzards of 

 some he found fragments of barnacle shells, and in 

 all he found little globular substances, about the size 

 of mustard-seed, which he conjectured to be the 

 sporaz, or germs of the gulf weed, of which such a 

 mass remains floating in the great central eddy of the 

 Atlantic, and continues sending fragments northward 

 down the stream. He conjectures also that the par- 

 tiality of these birds for the wakes of ships arises in 

 great part from the turning up of those substances by 

 the motion of the water, and also from the detaching 

 of barnacles from the ships' bottoms by the same 



