120 ANIMALS AT WORK AND PLA Y 



their behaviour when accompanying ships in mid- 

 ocean, After five had been shot by the owner of a 

 yacht in Loch Melfort, they settled on the vessel, and 

 one allowed itself to be caught under the sou'-wester 

 hat of a sailor. 



As we have said, the petrels are true ocean-birds, 

 living by choice far from land, in the ' uttermost parts 

 of the sea/ Perhaps their favourite haunt is the great 

 Southern Ocean beyond the Tropics. There, at any- 

 rate, is the main nesting-place of Wilson's petrel, on 

 the Island of Kerguelen. They also lay their eggs at 

 the southern points of Nova Scotia ; but though they 

 join and accompany the ships in the mid-passage to 

 and from Europe, they say ' Good-bye ! ' at the 

 Azores, as the stormy petrels did to Tom the Water 

 Baby when he reached the ice-pack, and nothing but 

 the extremity of distress could force them to the 

 English shore. 



Perhaps the strangest instance of the forced 

 wandering of a petrel was that which brought one of 

 the last-known members of an extinct, or at any- 

 rate a lost species, the capped petrel, whose only 

 home appears to have been the islands of St Domingo 

 and Guadaloupe, from the West India seas to a 

 Norfolk heath. In March or April 1850, a bird 

 was seen by a boy on a heath at Southacre, in 

 Norfolk, flapping from one furze-bush to another, 



