LITTLE AUK. 
225 
peculiar circumstances. Instances are recorded of 
specimens being procured on various parts of the 
English coasts, and also on those of Ireland, Mr. 
Tliompson suspecting that it may breed in the 
same locality with Brunnich’s Guillemot ; but one 
or two remarkable instances are mentioned by Mr. 
Yarrell, on the authority of Dr. Clarke of Hartle- 
pool, where flocks of hundreds were driven upon 
the coast, by a violent storm from N.N.E., and 
where five or six were sometimes killed at a shot. 
A similar circumstance happened on the Yorkshire 
coast; and on tho cessation of tho gale, they again 
disappeared. On tho southern Scottish coasts, spe- 
cimens have been very seldom procured, but it is seen 
sparingly on the northern islands. Dunn says it ap- 
pears regularly in Shetland every winter, though ho 
had not heard of it visiting Orkney ; stretching still 
northward, its proper resorts are the vicinity on both 
sides of the arctic circle, in some parts appearing 
in great abundance, according to Captain Sabine, 
even “ supplying the ship's company with a variation 
of food and Capt. Beechy, in his account of the 
voyage to the North Pole, iu 1815, under command 
of Capt. Duncan, in the Dorothea and Trent, while 
describing tho scenery of Magdalena Bay, a deep 
commodious inlet on the western side of Spitzbergen, 
writes, — “ At the head of the hay there is a high 
pyramidal mountain of granite, termed Kotge Hill, 
from the myriads of small birds of that name that fre- 
* Birds of Greenland, page 46. 
