The Zoologist— June, 1866. 243 



Letters on Ornithology. By Harry Blake-Knox, Esq. 



Letter T.— British Pelicanid.e. 

 Subfamily Phalacrocorax. Genus Graculus. 



A Natural History of the Shag or Green Cormorant, with an 

 Account of all its Plumages and Transformations from the 

 Nestling to the Adult Bird. 



Having devoted, I may say, the last six years of my life to the 

 exclusive study of the sea-birds in their native haunts, as well during 

 stormy winters as sunny summers, and having noted many of their 

 habits and peculiarities, many of their changes of plumage, and most 

 things that tune devoted to the subject could teach me, I now undertake 

 to write some letters on the sea-fowl, more particularly on the habits 

 and plumages of those frequenting the County Dublin. The imma- 

 ture plumages I have made my particular study, and as many of them 

 were never in print before, and never followed out on a continuous 

 Cham by any author, for the several years passed in immaturity by 

 most of the sea-birds, I therefore hope that these letters may interest 

 some, and also supply a want long felt-a truthful and accurate 

 Recount of the plumages and transformations of the various water- 

 birds so common and yet so obscure. It is not without reluctance 

 that I sit down to write these letters; first, because I am like a bird 

 and love the free air, and one hour's confinement to a room irritates 

 me ; secondly, because the result of my labours in tracing the immature 

 plumages of the various species from one season to another, till I have 

 connected them in a distinct chain, link by link, from the first plumage 

 to that of the adult, may be doubted, particularly when 1 must con- 

 tradict authors long followed as the wise men of Science, and looked 

 up to as the settlers of every dispute, or fill up gaps in their writings, 

 on these plumages, so glibly passed over as being "so various" or 

 so well known to everyone as to be needless to describe." Now 

 these plumages are not known to everyone, and were not known to 

 those themselves who wrote thus, as their writings show. Any author 

 that I have read, in giving the seasonal plumages, only shows how very 

 Ignorant he was on the subject. My collection of immatures in their 

 various stages has been visited by "professors," and they could make 

 no hand of it, not knowing the herring gull from the lesser blackback 



