570 THE BIRDS OF HELIGOLAND 



378. Manx Shearwater [ENGLTSCHER STURMVOGEL]. 

 PROCELLARIA ANGLORUM, Temminck.i 



Heligolandish name for this species, ' Marmuck ' : in Norway applied 

 to the Fulmar. 



Puffinus arcticus. Naumann, x. 618. 



Manx Shearwater. Dresser, viii. 517. 



Puffin manks. Temminck, Manuel, ii. 806, iv. 509. 



As already mentioned, this species was twenty-five years ago, 

 of quite common and well-known occurrence. Reymers has often 

 told me of shooting excursions on which he killed from ten to 

 fifteen of these birds in the course of a morning. Naumann, who 

 visited Heligoland in 1840, used at that time repeatedly to obtain 

 specimens from Reymers, which the latter found at sea in smaller or 

 larger flocks, most frequently off the southern extremity of the 

 dune. Since that time the bird has entirely and, indeed, had 

 almost suddenly disappeared. Ever since I have been collecting 

 I have only once, about thirty-five years ago, obtained a young bird 

 of the year after the moult or in autumn plumage (junger Herbst- 

 vogel) and have never heard of its being seen on the sea, either far 

 from or near to the island. 



This complete disappearance of the bird from this island has 

 probably some connection with similar phenomena on the coast of 

 Great Britain. Seebohm says that on the Scottish islands many of 

 the breeding haunts of this species have been abandoned, and, 

 according to Dresser, the birds have been completely supplanted in 

 other localities by the Puffin. However, the bird still breeds 

 numerously on the Orkney Islands, and one might expect that 

 some of the young from these colonies would wander far south 

 into the North Sea, unless there are causes at work preventing this. 

 One feels inclined to suspect that the disappearance of some 

 favourite kind of food is accountable for the recession of this inter- 

 esting species. 



Apart from the Orkneys and Shetlands, it breeds very 

 numerously in Iceland, the Faroes, St. Kilda, and almost all the 

 islands of the west coast of Scotland and Ireland, south to the 

 Scilly, Azores, and Canary Islands, as well as on several of the 

 Mediterranean islands as far as the Bosphorus. 



1 Puffinus anglorum (Temm.). 



