BIRDS LOST IN STORMS 1 2 1 



until it crept into one, and was there caught by 

 him. Exhausted as it was, it violently bit his hand, 

 and he thereupon killed it. A Mr Newcome, one 

 of a race of falconers, happened to be hawking in 

 the neighbourhood, and his falconer, seeing the boy 

 with the dead bird, brought it to his master, by 

 whom it was skinned and stuffed, and placed in the 

 Newcome collection, where it still remains. It was 

 a large bird, about 16 in. in length, with the long 

 curved wings characteristic of all the petrels, and a 

 black head, as its name indicates. 



Only two other instances of the capped petrel's 

 appearance in Europe are known. One was shot 

 near Boulogne, and one in Hungary in 1870, which 

 is in the Museum of Buda-Pesth. Two others have 

 been taken in the United States. But the strangest 

 part of the story is that the capped petrels are now 

 either extinct, or lost to the knowledge of man. c It 

 is certain,' says Mr Southwell, the editor of the last 

 and unfinished volume of Stevenson's Birds of Norfolk^ 

 * that the true home of this very rare species is, or 

 was, in the islands of Guadaloupe and Dominica, in the 

 West Indies, where it was formerly very abundant ; 

 but one of its old breeding-places in the last-named 

 of these islands was explored, without finding a 

 single bird, in February 1889, by Colonel Feilden.' 

 It appears that ten years before, not only Dominica 



