220 
British Birds. 
THE SOOTY 
SHEARWATER. 
( Puffinus griseus.) 
See p. 218. 
THE CAPPED 
PETREL. 
(CEstrelata hcesitata.) 
Sec p. 217. 
Cape Verde Islands, there is nothing extraordinary in its occurrence in British waters. 
It has a very wide distribution over the seas of the tropics, and ranges from New 
Zealand and Australia through the Atlantic to the Madeira group. 
Several specimens of the Sooty Shearwater have been 
obtained on our coasts in summer and autumn, but it can only 
be considered to be an accidental visitor to Great Britain. It is 
a small species, about eighteen inches in length, with a wing of 
twelve inches, but it can easily be distinguished by the sooty- 
brown colour of both upper and under surface, and by its inner wing-coverts, which 
are white with dusky shafts to the feathers. It is almost cosmopolitan in its range, 
being found in both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, reaching to the Faeroe Islands 
in the former and to the Kurile group in the latter, while in the south its range 
extends to the Straits of Magellan, as well as to the Auckland Islands and New 
Zealand. It breeds in the small islands in the latter region, laying a single white 
egg in a burrow, which it excavates for itself in the peaty soil. 
The species of the genus CEstrelata, to which the Capped Petrel 
belongs, differ from the members of the genus Puffinus in having 
a rounded, instead of a compressed, tarsus, in the shorter bill, and 
in the smaller size of the hallux. The Capped Petrel is a very 
rare bird, and but few specimens have been obtained. Nothing 
is known of the place where it breeds, but its nesting habitat is believed to be 
in the mountains of some of the West Indian Islands, probably Haiti, Martinique, 
or Guadeloupe. From the latter island there are four specimens in the Paris 
Museum, and single examples have been obtained in Hungary, near Boulogne, in 
Eastern Florida, and on Long Island, New York One British specimen was captured 
in Norfolk in the spring of 1850. In this species the back is sooty-brown and the head 
black, forming the cap from which the bird takes its name ; the back of the neck is 
white, like the under surface and the upper tail-coverts. 
As an instance of the way in which Petrels wander from their 
normal habitats, no better example could have been found than 
in the occur- 
rence of O. 
brevipes in 
A single specimen was 
presented to the British Museum 
by Mr. Willis Bund : it was 
obtained near Aberystwith in the 
winter of 1889. The only habitat 
of the species previously known 
was in the Pacific Ocean, hav- 
ing been met with in the Fiji The White-throated Grey Petrel. 
THE WHITE- 
THROATED 
GREY PETREL. 
(CEstrelata brevipes. 
England. 
