LIFE HISTORIES OF NORTH AMERICAN DIVING BIRDS. 195 
bird: When launching into the air off a cliff or when rising from 
the ground or water, in which it experiences considerable difficulty 
in calm weather, the body plumage is very much flattened, producing 
an aeroplane effect; it does the same thing when about to alight, 
checking its motion by spreading its body against the air with widely 
extended feet and rapidly “back peddling” with its wings. It is a 
good swimmer and an expert diver. When swimming below the sur- 
face it uses its wings to good advantage and makes rapid progress. 
Mr. Turner says of its vocal performances: 
The note of this species is at times peculiarly hoarse and guttural and at 
other times it makes a note impossible to imitate when it thrusts its beak into 
the. water. Another. sound uttered is exactly like the bleating of a sheep and 
also scarcely distinguishable from one of the sounds made by the fur seal 
Callorhinus ursinus. 
It is usually a silent, bird, but has a soft purring note suggested by 
its name; I have also heard it utter a loud croaking note when 
on the wing. 
Winter—Although the Briinnich’s murre often spends the winter 
as far north as it can find open water there is a general southward 
movement of the species. It frequently remains all winter in Hud- 
son Bay during favorable seasons; it winters regularly in the Gulf 
of St. Lawrence and on the coast. of Maine from November to March; 
it occurs more or less regularly off the coast of Massachusetts in 
winter and as a straggler to Long Island, and even to North and 
South Carolina. The erratic wanderings of this species in winter 
have furnished material for a large number of interesting records, 
along the Atlantic coast and, strangely enough, well into the interior, 
chiefly in the vicinity of the Great Lakes, as far west as Michigan 
and Indiana. Rather than attempt to give these records or even 
outline the unusual migration, I would refer the reader to an ex- 
cellent paper on the subject read by Mr. J. H. Fleming, of Toronto, 
at the International Ornithological Congress in 1905. The conclusion 
to be drawn from a study of these wanderings, for a period of 15 
years from 1890 to 1905, over a wide inland area far remote from the 
normal haunts of this Tain species, is that its winter feeding 
grounds in the southern portions of Hudson Bay became so thor- 
oughly blocked with drift ice, and frozen over, that the birds were 
forced to migrate in search of food and many of them perished in a 
fruitless effort to find it. 
DISTRIBUTION. 
Breeding range. Coasts and islands of the North Atlantic and 
Arctic Oceans. From the Gulf of St. Lawrence (Bird Rock), New- 
foundland and Labrador northward to northern Greenland (Bow- 
doin Bay, Smith Sound, Cape Sabine to 81° and 82°), North Devon, 
55916—19—Bull. 107-—- 14 
