THE BIRDS OF AUSTRALIA. 
Writing of this bird, Gould, who collected the type, says : “ My acquaintance 
with this species commenced on the 1 2th of August, 1839, when off Cape 
Agulhas on my voyage to Australia, and from that date it was almost daily 
observed during our transit across the South Indian Ocean until we arrived 
at Tasmania on the 19th of September ; its numbers gradually increasing from 
the neighbourhood of the islands of St. Paul and Amsterdam to the termina-^ 
tion of the voyage. In March 1840, during my passage home, I again met 
with it in great abundance between the eastern coast of Australia and New 
Zealand.” 
From the Rev. A. E. Eaton’s notes* I gather that the shrill piping note which 
the bird utters at night, when on the wing, is repeated singly at intervals of four 
to six seconds. This call might be imitated on a piccolo fife in the key of 
G or F. In its complete form it consists of a series of single notes separated 
by pauses of four seconds or more, followed by a jerky succession of notes in 
the same tone. 
By following this call the nest was discovered and the female caught. 
The bird figured and described is a male collected at sea in lat. 36° 27' S. 
long. 40° 41' E. 
There has been a lot of confusion in dealing with the species of Fregetta, 
due to the fact that solitary sea-killed specimens from widely distant localities 
constitute the great part of the material available. 
In the Ann. Mag. Nat. Hist., Vol. XIII., 1844, Gould, probably one of the 
keenest-eyed ornithologists the world has ever seen, wrote upon the Petrels, and 
there introduced three new species of Thalassidronia, viz. tropica, 7 nelanogaster 
and leucogaster. The last named I will discuss in the following article, the 
original descriptions of the former two are as follows : — 
p. 366] Thalassidrotna tropica, n. sp. Head, back, wings, tail and breast dark sooty black, cbin, 
under-coverts of the wings, abdomen, flanks, under tail-coverts, and a broad crescent-shaped 
band across the upper tail-coverts snow-white ; bill, feet and legs black. Total length 7 
inches ; bill | ; wing 6| ; tail 3| ; tarsi If ; middle toe and nail ip 
In the Atlantic, where it is confined to the equatorial regions. 
p. 367] Thalassidroma melanogaster, n. sp. All the plumage deep sooty black, with the exception 
of the upper tail-coverts and flanks, which are snow-white ; bill, legs and feet black. Total 
length 7^ inches ; bill f ; wing 6 ; tail 3 ; tarsi If ; middle toe and nail ip 
Very abundant in the South Pacific and Indian oceans, particularly off the islands of St.. 
Paul and Amsterdam. 
Bonaparte misidentified the former with a very distinct species and it 
remained until 1871, when Gray, in the Handlist Gen. Sp. Birds Brit. Mus., 
Vol. III., p. 104, restricted P. tropica to the Atlantic Ocean, and admitted 
P. grallaria V. (of which he made P. leucogaster Gould a synonym) and P. 
melanogaster Gould as inhabiting the Australian seas. 
* Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc., Vol. 168, p. 131, 1879. 
34 
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