Tue ZooLocist—JULY, 1876. 5007 
willow, some distance from the ground, and reared in safety fourteen young 
ones.—C. Matthew Prior. 
Scarcity of the Razorbill.—I am not in a position to answer Mr. Gurney’s 
question as to whether the razorbill is getting scarcer on our coasts; but 
you will perhaps permit me to point out that there are two principal causes 
why it should be so, and as Mr. Gurney’s note (Zool. 8. S. 4959) supplies 
one of them, I will here give it the precedence. It would have been more 
interesting and clearer if Mr. Gurney had given us the exact date of his 
visit to Flamborough, as it would have nearly fixed the date of Mr. Bailey’s 
great slaughter amongst these poor birds; but from the way I read the 
latter part of the note, it appears to me that Mr. Gurney was at Flam- 
borough just before the razorbills had arrived to breed, and that as soon as 
they did arrive Mr. Bailey shot twenty. Now it would be very interesting— 
to more than myself, I think—to know what use these twenty dead razor- 
bills were to Mr. Bailey after he had shot them. Bearing in mind that the 
razorbill lays only one egg,—and I need scarcely, I think, remind readers 
of the ‘ Zoologist’ that they too are ruthlessly destroyed,—the query appears 
to me to be, not so much as to the species becoming scarcer, but how it 
happens that there are twenty left to visit Flamborough or any other place 
to be shot. I need not be considered out of the way if I assume that every 
breeding station of the razorbill on the British coasts produces a Mr. Some- 
body who you may be sure is anything but a “ crack shot,” but all birds are 
tame in the breeding season. The second cause—not quite so easy of 
explanation—is the strange mortality so often noted in the ‘ Zoologist’ as 
taking place amongst them, almost periodically, on different parts of the 
coast. In the ‘ Zoologist’ for March, 1872, there appears an editorial 
remark, which I beg the author will allow me to repeat here. Mr. Newman 
says, “This morning (February 21st) I met a man going over London 
Bridge with a clothes-basket full of razorbills; he could not, or would not, 
tell me how he came by them, but, by the blood on their plumage, I think 
they had come by a violent death.” I should like to know whether they 
are shot in such large numbers for any particular purpose. I have before 
this mentioned that some of the “gunners” on this part of the coast use 
the feathers of all sea-birds they may obtain, and also that some of them 
eat the flesh of the gulls; but I presume that the most terrible havoc is 
caused by such as shoot them for what is called “sport.”——John Scelater ; 
Castle Eden, June 18, 1876. 
Manx Shearwater.—In the ‘ Birds of Northumberland and Durham ’— 
one of the best local catalogues that has seen the light for many a day— 
there is a description of a bird resembling a Manx shearwater, except in 
being rather larger, and in “the back being two shades paler,” and the 
whole of the under parts of the body “ having the feathers tipped with ash- 
colour” (7. ¢., p.133). As among some ornithologists there has been a little 
