The Auk (Volume 6) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: AN ACCOUNT OF THE BREEDING HABITS OF PUFFINU8 AUDUBONI IN THE ISLAND OF GRENADA, WEST INDIES. WITH A NOTE ON ZENAIDA RUB RIPE 8. BY GEORGE N. LAWRENCE. I Have received a letter from Mr. John G. Wells in which he writes as follows: "I had an outing on Easter Mondav, and was fortunate enough to procure a bird new to our fauna, a description of which I enclose, and skins go by book post, which I trust will reach vou safelv, and that I shall soon have the pleasure of reading your decision on them." The birds sent proved to be t'uffinus auduboni. The following letter from Mr. Wells, dated Grenada, April 23, 1888, gives an account of his finding and procuring specimens of it while breeding, and also some facts connected with its life history. "About eight or ten years ago numbers of dried birds used to be brought in to the m-irket at Greenville for sale; they were young birds and very fai. The men who sold them said they were the young of the 'Diablotin, ' and were caught in holes, on a small island to the eastward called Mouchoir Quarre. I endeavored to procure a live one but without avail, and in fact so many improbable stories were told concerning this bird, that I looked upon the 'Diablotin' as a myth, and concluded that the dried birds were the young of some species of Gull. My interest in the matter has. however, been recentlv revived. On Easter Monday last (2nd April, 1888) I paid a visit to a small islet called Labave Rock, about a mile off the Port of Greenville, a place where I had been on many previous occasions. On exploring the Rock, a young bird was discovered in a hole under a stone; it was covered with down: in fact it seemed like a ball of fat enclosed in down. One of the boatmen pronounced it to be a young 'Diablotin'; this, as you may suppose, c...