569 



-,. 

 Family DIOMEDEID^E. 



BLACK-BROWED ALBATROSS. Diomedea melanophrys 



(Boie). 



This bird, abundant in the Southern Oceans, and 

 breeding on many of the islands of the Antipodes, has on 

 several occasions wandered to latitudes even north 1 of the 

 British Isles. But as a British species it has been only 

 once recorded. An exhausted specimen was captured near 

 Linton in Cambridgeshire, on July 9th, 1897 (' Ibis,' 1897, 

 p. 625). " Mr. Southwell has neatly remarked that after all 

 the species was only revisiting the haunts of its remote 

 ancestors, for the bones of an Albatross of medium size, from 

 the Suffolk ' red crag,' near Ipswich, have been described 

 and figured by Mr. R. Lydekker " (Saunders). 



DESCRIPTIVE CHARACTERS. 



PLUMAGE. Adult male nuptial. Head, neck, breast, and 

 abdomen, white ; over the eye there is a dark bluish-black 

 stripe ; scapulars and wings, very dark brown ; middle of 

 the back, light greyish-brown ; tail-feathers, slate-grey, with 

 white shafts ; under wing-coverts, white ; a wide greyish- 

 black border extends along the edges of the wing. 



Adult female nuptial. Similar to the male plumage. 



Adult winter, male and female. Similar to the nuptial 

 plumage. 



Immature. Eesembles the adult plumage. 



1 It is interesting to note that north of our Isles this species has been 

 recorded of recent years as follows : (1) A specimen shot near Myg- 

 ganaes, in the Faroes, in 1893, the bird having frequented that Island for 

 some thirty or forty years (Saunders). 



(2) An Albatross, probably of this species, observed about twenty 

 miles off the Orkneys, on June 18th, 1894, and another shot at sea oil 

 the Faroe banks, about seventy or eighty miles south-west of Thorshavn 

 in 1900 (Harvie-Brown). 



