Manx Shearwater. 541 



search of food * but on land they can neither stand nor walk 

 upright, but shuffle along on the breast. They are true birds of 

 the ocean, and, I may say, birds of the storm : for during the 

 darkest nights and the most tempestuous weather they may be 

 descried following in the wake of the ship in ease and comfort, 

 skimming along the surface of the water, and even resting in 

 the greatest composure in the most tremendous seas. Their 

 principal food is fat or whatever floating animal substance they 

 can find which is reducible to oil. The Manx Shearwater, 

 though rarely seen on the eastern, is abundant on the western 

 coasts of England ; but from its habit of passing the day in the 

 holes or burrows where it breeds, and only sallying forth by 

 night, it is not very generally met with. When on land they 

 sit very nearly in an upright position. This bird is not in 

 reality a Puffin, nor does it even belong to the same family as 

 , the well-known grotesque species which we know so well under 

 that name ; but it has come to be generally recognised as 

 Puffinus from Willoughby having called it ' the Puffin of the 

 Isle of Man ' : nor, indeed, has it special claims of Manx citizen- 

 ship beyond the fact that the western coasts of Great Britain are 

 the localities it chiefly affects. But it retires to the Mediter- 

 ranean for the winter. This is the species so numerous on the 

 Bosphorus, where long files of them are ever flying through the 

 channel, an up and down train several hundred yards in length 

 being often in sight at the same time. These are commonly 

 believed to be the dmes damne'es of Sultanas who got the sack 

 under the old regime.^ I am aware of but two specimens 

 having made their appearance in Wiltshire, one that was taken 

 by a boy at Market Lavington from a hole in a hayfield and 

 carried to Mr. Elgar Sloper at Devizes ; and the second, as Mr. 

 Thomas Kemm informed me, taken by his son at Avebury alive, 

 but apparently wounded, early in September, 1879. In France 

 it is Petrel Manx and Le Puffin cendre" ; in Norway, Skrapa ; 

 and in Spain, Baltridja, and in some parts Virot; but, from 



Selby's ' Illustrations of British Ornithology/ vol. ii., p. 527. 

 f W. H. Simpson in Ibis for 1861, p. 366. 



