FULMARS, SHEARWATERS, PETRELS 173 



America Albatrosses are almost unknown, and there are but few records 

 of their occurrence. Albatrosses are among the most tireless and wide- 

 ranging of ocean wanderers. The flight of the Wandering Albatross 

 (Diomedea exulans), which Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" 

 has made more widely known than all that naturalists have ever written 

 about it, is thus described by Professor Hut ton: "With outstretched, 

 motionless wings, he sails over the surface of the sea, now rising high 

 in the air, now with a bold sweep, and wings inclined at an angle with 

 the horizon, descending until the tip of the lower one all but touches 

 the crests of the waves as he skims over them." On the water "he is 

 at home, breasting the waves like a cork. Presently he stretches out 

 his neck, and with great exertion of his wings runs along the top of the 

 water for seventy or eighty yards, until, at last, having got sufficient 

 impetus, he tucks up his legs, and is once more fairly launched in 

 the air." 



Lucas writes, "The Albatross has that type of wing which best 

 fulfils the conditions necessary for an aeroplane, being long and narrow, 

 so that, while a full-grown Wandering Albatross may spread from ten 

 to twelve feet* from tip to tip, this wing is not more than nine inches 

 wide." 



The YELLOW-NOSED ALBATROSS (83. Thalassogeron culminatus) , a 

 southern species, is said to have been taken once in Quebec (Chamberlain, 

 Nuttall's Manual, 2d ed., II, p. 277). 



8. FAMILY PROCELLARIID.E. FULMARS, SHEARWATERS, AND 

 PETRELS. (Fig. 266.) 



The about one hundred known members of this family are dis- 

 tributed over the seas of the world. Thirty-five species have been found 

 in North America, of which only seven occur regularly on our Atlantic 

 coast. Like their large relatives, the Albatrosses, they are strictly 

 pelagic, and visit the land only to nest. The strong, swift scaling flight 

 of Shearwaters, and the graceful swallow-like movements of the smaller 

 "Mother Carey's Chickens," are familiar sights to those who go "down 

 to the sea in ships." Living where storms attain their greatest power, 

 where there is no shelter from the gale other than the troubled sea 

 itself, Petrels are sometimes carried far out of their course by the wind, 

 no less than seven of the seventeen species recorded from North America 

 being of accidental occurrence. 



The Fulmars (genus Fulmarus) nest like Gulls, in vast numbers, on 

 islets off the coasts of the North Atlantic and North Pacific. Compara- 

 tively little is known of the nesting-places of our Shearwaters, but it 

 is probable that most of them breed in the southern hemisphere and 

 migrate northward to pass their winter (our summer) off our coasts. 

 One of our Petrels (Oceanites) has this habit, the other two nest in 

 the North Atlantic. 



All the birds of this group, so far as known, lay but a single egg. 



