OCCASIONAL NOTES. 119 
more than twenty have been seen together. When only four or 
five were together they were not wild, having in two instances 
been within a stone’s throw of the observer. Some, but not all, 
were evidently Bernicle Geese, from the descriptions I heard of 
them. The Kittiwake, Herring, Greater and Lesser Black-backed 
and Common Gulls are all to be seen in varying numbers, and 
when shooting on the shore on November 23rd, 1877, the 
Rey. C. F. Smith was lucky enough to secure a specimen of the 
immature Glaucous Gull. 
I have never seen the Guillemot or Puffin alive about here, 
but I have found both birds dead on the shore in a sufficiently 
fresh state for stuffing. 
Among the smaller birds of the district the Mountain Finch 
and more rarely the Snow Bunting may be mentioned. 
OCCASIONAL NOTES. 
VoyacE oF THE ‘ALERT’ TO THE Straits oF MacEtian.—The 
following extracts from a letter addressed to Captain Feilden by Dr. R. W. 
Coppinger, Surgeon and Naturalist of H.M.S. ‘ Alert,’ dated Monte Video, 
30th November, 1878, will be read with interest. The ‘ Alert,’ under the 
command of Captain Sir George Nares, K.C.B., is now engaged in com- 
pleting the surveys of the Straits of Magellan :—“ As our voyage so far has 
been a rather hurried one, I have had, as you may imagine, but few 
opportunities of doing Natural History work, either ashore or afloat. The 
only places as yet touched at have been Madeira, St. Vincent (Cape de 
Verde), and our present anchorage. During the few days of our stay at 
Madeira, we dredged several times in the 5—35-fathoms belt, at various 
stations along the coast for about seven miles to the eastward and westward 
of the town of Funchal. It did not prove a very productive region in the 
molluscan way, as I only got representatives of about seven genera of shells, 
besides a few Annelids, Crustaceans and Echinoderms. Serpule were very 
abundant. At Porto Santo (St. Vincent) I spent one day dredging over 
the 8—12-fathom belt, and there I obtained some fine specimens of 
Strombus, and great numbers of a large blunt-spined Cidaris. Of littoral 
shells, living and dead, many were picked up. On our way down the South 
Atlantic we took a few deep-sea soundings in 2000 fathoms and thereabouts, 
far from the track of the ‘Challenger,’ and these have furnished me with 
little sackfulls of globigerina ooze. On reaching the position of the Hotspur 
Bank, in lat. 17° 32’ S., long. 35° 46’ W., we put the dredge overboard in 
