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Mr. Napier Bell, the well-known Civil Engineer, in a letter from Perth, Western Australia, 

 says : " Two islands here are the home of the Giant Petrel. This bird is as large as a goose, 

 and of a dark slate-colour. I saw one which flew on board one of the dredges at Fremantle and 

 dropped into the hopper, which is a great compartment where the dredge deposits its dredging ; 

 but, as this dredge is worked by suction from pipes laid to the shore, the hopper is unused 

 and full of water. The bird has lived there quite contentedly for a month, and refuses to 

 leave the hopper. It is fed every day, swims about in the water, and roosts in the iron 

 girders." 



I do not know a better instance of dimorphic colouring than in the case of the Giant 

 Petrel, or Nelly. I have on several occasions commented upon the frequency of white Nellies. 

 Generally they have widely scattered slaty-black feathers all over the body ; occasionally the 

 entire plumage is pure white, as in a beautiful specimen in my collection from the Bounty 

 Islands. The late Captain Fairchild, to whom I was indebted for this bird, assured me that 

 he had more than once observed several white ones in the air together, and I have had the same 

 account from Mr. Bethune, the Chief Engineer of the Government steamer. Sometimes, however, 

 they are of a uniform whitish grey colour. Mr. Jennings informed me that on his last visit to 

 Macquarie Island he observed more white Nellies than dark ones. They were breeding at that 

 time, and he specially noticed that the young of the white Nellies were likewise white. This, of 

 course, is a very important point, and seems to settle the question of dimorphism in this 

 species. 



Almost every collection of New Zealand birds in the Colony possesses one or more white 

 specimens. There are some beautiful examples in the Hon. Walter Eothschild's Museum at 

 Tring. In the Natural History Museum at New York there is a specimen with a few widely 

 scattered slaty-black spots. It is marked as "from the Maximilian collection," but no locality 

 is assigned to it. 



Major Alexander, C.M.G., Private Secretary to H.E. the Earl of Kanfurly, wrote to me on 

 March 4th, 1902 : " It will interest you to know that, on our recent trip to Macquarie Island, we 

 shot two white Nellies, after pursuing them for two whole days. They are really splendid birds. 

 I believe one was shot by Borchgrevink at the Antarctica. The Governor sent one of his to the 

 British Museum and the other to Tring. At the Auckland Islands we also got a brace of 

 Merganser australis — the only ones we saw. Owing to the stormy weather off the Bounties, we 

 were unable to procure any more Phalacrocorax ranfurl/yi." 



Mr. Salvia says : " Young birds are much browner, and often white about the head, but their 

 plumage is changed for the uniform dark chocolate-brown of the adult. Nearly white individuals 

 are not uncommon. Lat. Southern Seas, north to about lat. 30° S." 



In my diary for 1893 I find mention of a solitary Ossifraga gigantea, on the afternoon of 

 March 19th, after passing the Falkland Islands ; and in my diary for 1898 occurs the following 

 passage : 



Off Samoa, October 29th. We have now been nearly a month at sea in these tropical latitudes and we 

 have seen practically no birds at all. To-day I saw a large dark Petrel in the distance— to all appearance 

 Ossifraga gigantea — and yesterday a Plover of some sort hovered round the ship. Between New Zealand 

 and Tonga, on October 12th and 13th, I saw a few Diomedea exulans, in the dark plumage of immaturity, but 

 no adult birds. On the 14th I saw a single Pintado Petrel (Daption capensis). 



I have a record of seeing several of them coursing about our ship, on February 25th, when 

 about twenty miles eastward of Kerguelen's Land. These are the only references to the Giant 

 Petrel I can find in all my ocean journals, so I conclude that its habit is not to travel far away 

 from the land. 



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