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Updated: May 22, 2025
The month of July set in more favourably; and aided by fresh breezes we advanced rapidly to the westward, attended daily by numerous fulmars and shearwaters. The Missionary brig had parted company on the 22nd of June. We passed directly over that part of the ocean where the Sunken Land of Buss is laid down in the old, and continued in the Admiralty charts. Mr.
There was a heavyish sea at the time, and the Shearwaters were generally flying under the lee of the waves, just rising sufficiently to avoid the crest of the wave when it broke.
Only the shearwaters moaning in their burrows, the little wingless rail skulking from one grass tussock to another, and the saucy finch remained. It is an excellent example of what Prof. Nutting calls the survival of the inconspicuous. "Here on every side are bones bleaching in the sun, showing where the poachers had piled the bodies of the birds as they stripped them of wings and feathers.
The Cape pigeons were the prettiest of all the birds that visited the ship, being very like the common wood pigeon in the shape of their head and bill, but having webbed feet to suit their aquatic habits. They were much plumper, too, than either the shearwaters or parsons which latter, by the way, unlike the fat cleric of popular opinion, were of very slender and delicate proportions.
Our officers had their guns on deck, and amused themselves by shooting as many of the birds which came in their way as they could; but my messmates called them by the various names of shearwaters, boatswains, kittiwakes, dovekies, Mollymokes or Mollies, gulls, buntings, and many others, whose names I forget.
Almost invariably I have found in the stomach of the many kinds of albatrosses, petrels, and shearwaters, which I have examined, the undigested horny mandibles of cuttlefish, which would thus appear to constitute their principal food; and, as all the petrel family are to a certain extent nocturnal, it seems probable that the small cuttlefish on which they feed approach the surface only at night.
The 3rd of May, being in latitude 20 degrees 00 minutes and meridian distance west from Cape Salvador 234 miles, the variation was 7 degrees 00 minutes. We saw no fowl but shearwaters, as our seamen call them, being a small black fowl that sweep the water as they fly, and are much in the seas that lie without either of the tropics: they are not eaten.
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