Volume 9 - Electric Scotland

244 ANNALS OF SCOTTISH NATURAL HISTORY
of Sanda, off the south end of Kintyre, about forty years ago. If
"
the too eager sportsman of kind " could resist the temptation
of shooting at such rare visitors when they do come our way, there
might still be some chance of them taking up their abode in Clyde
waters again. ALEXANDER GRAY, Curator, Marine Biological
Station,
Millport.
The White-beaked Dolphin (Lagenorhynchus albirostris, Gray)
in Bute, with Remarks on the Dolphins of the Clyde Waters.
In November last Mr. John Robertson found, cast up on the beach,
about a mile north of St. Ninian's Bay, Bute, the carcase of a small
cetacean, of which he wrote me at the time that " it was rather
badly mangled, the tail and lower jaw being awanting. . . The
.
length as it lay was about 7 feet, but doubtless in life it would
be another 18 inches or 2 feet longer." In June Mr. Robertson
and other members of the Andersonian Naturalists' Society recovered
the skull and sternum, well cleaned by nature, and sent
them to me to be identified and shown at a meeting of the Society.
I made the species to be the above named, an identification which
has been very kindly confirmed by Professor Sir Wm. Turner, with
whom the skull has been left to be placed in the Anatomical
Museum, Edinburgh. This museum has already a skull of this
Y. Buchanan
species from the Clyde, from an animal shot by Mr. J.
in Kilbrannan Sound in September 1879, as recorded by Sir Wm.
Turner ("Proc. Roy. Phys. Soc. Edin.," 1891, x. p. 14), who
further states that he saw in these waters, in August 1887, what
he believed to be a school of the White-beaked Dolphin. It may
be repeated here that we claim this Clyde specimen (obtained by
Mr. Buchanan) as the first authentic record of the species in Scottish
waters, as it ante-dates by one year the example obtained near the
Bell Rock ("Zoologist," iSSi, pp. 41-44), and which Messrs. Southwell
("Seals and Cetaceans of the British Seas," 1881, p. 127) and
Lydekker ("British Mammalia," 1896, p. 293) erroneously state
to be the first from Scotland. In the Kelvingrove Museum, Glasgow,
were four examples of this species (a stuffed specimen and
three skeletons, one being a fetus),
all from Kilbrannan Sound,
captured in 1894 and 1895 ("Zoologist," 1894, pp. 424-426,
and "Glasgow Herald," 7th September 1895). These occurrences
seem to indicate that the animal so well known in the waters of the
Firth of Clyde as the " bucker," and in Loch Fyne as the "stinker,"
is identical with this species. Fishermen and yachtsmen clearly
distinguish it from the Porpoise by its larger size and by
its conspicuous
habit of leaping out of the water ; by the Loch Fyne men
this is said to be "the stinkers threshing." I have seen a school
of about a dozen in the shallow waters of Whiting Bay, playing
and gambolling round the ferry-boat, throwing themselves well clear
of the water and falling back again with a resounding splash, a fine