PROCELLARIIDA. 731 
MADEIRAN FORK-TAILED PETREL. 
OCEANODROMA CaSsTRO (Harcourt). 
An example of this species was picked up dead on the beach at 
Littlestone in Kent, on the 5th of December 1895, and was 
examined in the flesh by Mr. Boyd Alexander, to whom it now 
belongs. It was exhibited at a meeting of the British Ornithologists’ 
Club on the 29th of April following (Ibis 1896, p. 401). 
This Petrel was known by the scientific name of Oceanodroma 
cryptoleucura (Ridgway), until Padre Ernesto Schmitz, of Madeira, 
drew Mr. Ogilvie Grant’s attention to the fact that the species had 
been thoroughly diagnosed in 1851 by the late Mr. E. Vernon 
Harcourt, who found it on the Desertas islets, and named it 
Thalassidroma castro, because it was called ‘“‘ Roque de castro” by 
the Madeiran fishermen (Ibis 1898, p. 313). This discovery 
having been totally overlooked, the species was described as new by 
Mr. Ridgway in 1882, from examples obtained in the Hawaiian 
Islands, where others were subsequently procured for Mr. Scott B. 
Wilson, by Mr. Francis Gay (Aves Hawaiienses, pt. iv.) An 
American expedition to the Galdpagos, moreover, met with this 
species in that group; while, passing to the Southern Ocean, there 
are specimens in the British Museum from Australia and the Island 
of St. Helena. In ‘The Auk’ for 1897, p. 297, Mr. W. Palmer 
states that after the severe storms of August 23rd to 27th 1893, two 
birds of this species were picked up within the limits of Washington 
city. To continue the list of wanderers, Mr. Herluf Winge, in his 
fourteenth Report of Birds which have occurred at the Danish 
Lights, records that in 1896 an example struck the light-ship at 
Drogden, a few miles south of Copenhagen, on the roth of 
