FULMARS, SHEARWATERS, PETRELS 173 
America Albatrosses are almost unknown, and there are but few records 
of their occurrence. Albatrosses are among the most tireless and wide- 
ranging of ocean wanderers. The flight of the Wandering Albatross 
(Diomedea exulans), which Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” 
has made more widely known than all that naturalists have ever written 
about it, is thus described by Professor Hutton: “With outstretched, 
motionless wings, he sails over the surface of the sea, now rising high 
in the air, now with a bold sweep, and wings inclined at an angle with 
the horizon, descending until the tip of the lower one all but touches 
the crests of the waves as he skims over them.” On the water “he is 
at home, breasting the waves like a cork. Presently he stretches out 
his neck, and with great exertion of his wings runs along the top of the 
water for seventy or eighty yards, until, at last, having got sufficient 
impetus, he tucks up his legs, and is once more fairly launched in 
the air.” 
Lucas writes, “The Albatross has that type of wing which best 
fulfils the conditions necessary for an aeroplane, being long and narrow, 
so that, while a full-grown Wandering Albatross may spread from ten 
to twelve feet from tip to tip, this wing is not more than nine inches 
wide.” 
The Yellow-nosed Albatross (88. Thalassogeron culminatus), a 
southern species, is said to have been taken once in Quebec (Chamberlain, 
Nuttall’s Manual, 2d ed., II, p. 277). 
8. Family Procellariid^]. Fulmars, Shearwaters, and 
Petrels. (Fig. 266.) 
The about one hundred known members of this family are dis- 
tributed over the seas of the world. Thirty-five species have been found 
in North America, of which only seven occur regularly on our Atlantic 
coast. Like their large relatives, the Albatrosses, they are strictly 
pelagic, and visit the land only to nest. The strong, swift scaling flight 
of Shearwaters, and the graceful swallow-like movements of the smaller 
“Mother Carey’s Chickens,” are familiar sights to those who go “down 
to the sea in ships.” Living where storms attain their greatest power, 
where there is no shelter from the gale other than the troubled sea 
itself, Petrels are sometimes carried far out of their course by the wind, 
no less than seven of the seventeen species recorded from North America 
being of accidental occurrence. 
The Fulmars (genus Fulmarus ) nest like Gulls, in vast numbers, on 
islets off the coasts of the North Atlantic and North Pacific. Compara- 
tively little is known of the nesting-places of our Shearwaters, but it 
is probable that most of them breed in the southern hemisphere and 
migrate northward to pass their winter (our summer) off our coasts. 
One of our Petrels ( Oceanites ) has this habit, the other two nest in 
the North Atlantic. 
All the birds of this group, so far as known, lay but a single egg. 
