266 
MANX SHEARWATER 
(iv. p. 255) says of his visit in 1827, 'We were much 
disappointed in scarcely being able to trace even the recol- 
lection of their former abundance,' and adds, 1 We are not 
aware of this Shearwater having been seen in the Solway, 
or about its entrance, for many years.' The same author 
wrote in 1836 to T. C. Hey sham : ' We went ... to seek the 
Manks Petrel, but were unsuccessful. The people said that 
it had left the Calf several years previously, and if any 
number had been there we should not have missed them.' 
(Macpherson, Vert. Fauna of Lakeland, p. 454.) 
The bird had some time before 1827 disappeared from the 
Calf, and it is quite likely that the confusion of the species 
with Fratercula arctica, which extended even into the 
scientific world, has caused its extinction to be placed much 
later than was really the case. Thus Train in 1845 calls it 
' Coulterneb Puffin ' and 1 Tommie-noddie,' and states that it 
visited the Calf 'down to the beginning of the present 
century.' Statements, sometimes vague, sometimes (like 
Woods' as above quoted) definite, that the advent of rats 
to the Calf was the cause of its extinction or departure, are 
to be found in Manx literature, and Jardine attributed its 
loss to the Calf being more frequented and a lighthouse 
built. Yarrell (1st ed. 1843, vol. iii. p. 508) also ascribes 
its disappearance there to the settlement of man, and says 
of its diminution in general that it is ' wholly occasioned 
by the wanton and greedy destruction of their eggs and 
young.' Perhaps the rivalry of Fratercula arctica, now so 
very dominant on the Calf, may have had more to do with 
it, as Messrs. Harvie- Brown and Buckley suggest in the 
case of deserted breeding stations in the Hebrides. In 
Naumann's great work (copied on p. 30, vol. xii. of the 
new edition from the original) it is said, 'An solchen 
Orten, wo sehr viele dieser Vogel auf einem Platze nahe 
beisammen nisten, wie friiher an mehreren Stellen auf Man, 
