122 ANIMALS AT WORK AND PLAY 



but also Guadaloupe was searched in vain for the 

 1 Diablotins,' the name by which these petrels were 

 known to the old voyagers. It is believed that they 

 were possibly destroyed by a South American opossum 

 which was introduced to the island ; but as the young 

 and even the old birds were constantly caught by the 

 islanders for food in the holes in which they nested, 

 their destruction may be due, like that of the great 

 auk, to human greediness. 



At first it seems difficult to believe that the 

 petrels, gifted with powers of flight so great that, 

 like their first cousins the albatrosses, they make 

 the central ocean their chosen home, should so far 

 succumb to the Atlantic storms as to fall wholly 

 under the dominion of the wind, and drift for 

 thousands of miles to unknown and inhospitable 

 shores. But any one who has watched the flight 

 of a ' lost ' bird in a gale on land may form some 

 idea of the danger to which the petrels are exposed 

 when a hurricane bursts in the Atlantic. Take, for 

 instance, this scene near Oxford, when a gale was at 

 its height, and the * centre boards ' were rushing up 

 and down over the floods on Port Meadow, with a 

 strong current and the wind on their quarter ; the 

 geese were flying over the flood to avoid the canoes 

 v and small craft ; and the wind was blowing a full 

 gale from the south-west, with a brilliant sun, occa- 



