88 NATURAL HISTORY OF BIRDS. 



one. Some find the ship that they were with the day before, some another one. In 

 the latter case, if the second ship is going in an opposite direction to the first, they 

 are never seen by the first again ; if, however, the course of the two ships is the same, 

 the bird might, very likely, lose the second ship, and rejoin the first, after a lapse of 

 two or three days. A height of 1000 feet would enable a bird to see a ship 200 feet 

 high more than fifty miles off, and often, although unable to see a ship itself, it would 

 see another bird which had evidently discovered one, and would follow it in the same 

 way that vultures are known to follow one another. This opinion is much strength- 

 ened by the fact that at sunrise very few birds are round the ship, but soon afterwards 

 they begin to arrive in large numbers." The same author enlarges on the general 

 history, especially the breeding habits of the albatross, a condensed account of which 

 will be found very interesting. The wandering albatrosses are very common south of 

 latitude 40 S. and monopolize nearly the whole of the Prince Edward's Islands and 

 the south-east portion, or lee-side, as the sealers call it, of Kerguelen Island, to which 

 places they retire to breed in October. The nest, which is always placed on high 

 table lands, is in the shape of the frustrum of a cone, with a slightly-hollowed top, and 

 is made of grass and mud, which the birds obtain by digging a circular ditch, about 

 two yards in diameter, and pushing the earth towards the centre, until it is about 

 eighteen inches high. In this nest the female bird lays one white egg, which is not 

 hatched until January. It is asserted, upon the authority of Mr. Richard Harris, 

 engineer of the Royal Navy, that the old birds leave their young and go to sea, and 

 do not return until the next October. " Each pair goes at once to its old nest, and 

 after a little fondling of the young one, which has remained in or near the nest the 

 whole time, they turn it out, and repair the nest for the next brood." Hutton thinks 

 that the old ones go to sea when the young are about three months old, and that the 

 latter are nocturnal in their habits, and go down to the sea at night to feed, returning 

 to their nests in the morning, though Harris's testimony is to the effect that the young 

 during that period are unable to fly. Mr. C. J. Anderson has suggested that the 

 young birds " live on their own fat " while the parents are absent, and asks : " If 

 other animals can live for several consecutive months on their own fat, why not 

 birds?" 



The PEOCELLABIID^E is the group richest in species, comprising, as it does, about 

 seventy different forms, in size varying from that of a sparrow, as the stormy petrels 

 (Procellaria, and Oceanodroma), to that of one of the smaller species of albatrosses, 

 as the giant fulmar ( Ossifraga gigantea). The most essential external characters are 

 the tubular nostrils on top of the culmen, combined with long wings, and the presence 

 of a small hind toe. Inter se the members of this family group themselves around 

 several somewhat diverging centres, forming more or less separate groups ; most inter- 

 esting, as far as anatomical peculiarities are concerned, being the so-called sub-family 

 Oceanitinse, which comprises four genera of small stormy-petrel-like birds, the most 

 striking feature of which are the small number of secondaries (ten only), the booted 

 or transversely scutellate, but never reticulate tarsus, the flat and depressed claws, 

 the length of the tarsus, absence of colic coeca, presence of an accessory semitendi- 

 nosus muscle, etc. Typical is Wilson's petrel ( Oceanites oceanica), like a ' Mother 

 Carey's chicken,' but with long, booted tarsus, and the webs between the toes yellow, 

 and also belonging to the North American fauna, though its centre of distribution 

 seems to be in the southern seas. It breeds, among other places, also on Kerguelen's 

 Island, to which the following sketch of its breeding-places by Rev. A. E. Eaton 



