Volume 9 - Electric Scotland

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44
ANNALS OF SCOTTISH NATURAL HISTORY
numerous. I counted fifty pairs, and then stopped but
;
there must have been very many more, for the mist became
a thick fog, so that one could only see a short way from the
ship, and it was not until much delay on this account that
we reached our destination.
Arrived at St. Kilda, Mr. Evans made inquiry of the
people, to all of whom, from his frequent visits, he is well
known, as to this large kind of Shearwater. Most of them
professed their ignorance of it, but some two or three thought
they had seen such a bird when fishing at a distance from
the land. He offered a suitable reward for a specimen if
one could be procured, and so we came away ;
but here I
may remark that, in accordance with his usual practice of
being an observing and not a collecting naturalist, on neither
of these occasions was there a gun on board his yacht. On
the 27th June, being the anniversary of the day on which
we had seen the birds between Lewis and North Rona, we
were passing along the very same course, but not a Great
Shearwater showed itself.
I am not sure whether it was later in this year, or in the
autumn of the next, that two or three Great Shearwaters
were seen by Mr. Evans to the southward of Skye. However,
in 1897, Mr. Evans, on revisiting St. Kilda, had delivered to
him the skin of an undoubted Great Shearwater, which had
been killed with an oar by a fisherman at some distance
from the islands on the 7th of August in that year. The
promised reward was duly paid, and the specimen was most
appropriately sent to Mr. W. Eagle Clarke to be placed in
the Museum of Science and Art in Edinburgh. Two more,
one to the
killed by St. Kilda fishermen in the same way,
south and the other to the north of the islands, in the fourth
week of July 1899, were handed over to Mr. Evans on one
of his visits last year, and these he has most kindly given to
the Zoological Museum of his old
University.
Examining these specimens on their reaching Cambridge,
I was at once struck by the state of their plumage. When
the birds met their death they were in deep moult, and it
was of such a kind that though
I will not undertake to assert
that they must have been wholly unable to fly, yet their
power to do so must have been seriously impaired.
Struck