Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 3.djvu/752

Rh BIRDS [EXTIRPATED FORM.S. of our day. The only assignable cause of the extinction of these creatures lies in the fact that these islands are known to have been laid waste by fire. The shells have resisted destruction but how many more animals must have FIG. 46. Distal portion of mandible of Lophopsittacus, lower and nppcr view. From spoci- i. men in the British Museum. These figures reproduced from The His, 1866, by permission D1 of the editor. Natural size. perished without leaving a trace of their existence ] Even at the present time, few parts of the world so overrun by people of European descent are from a naturalist s point of view so little known as the West-India Islands. Still Fio. 47. Extinct Starling of Rdunion (FregHvpiu variut), adapted from figures by Daubenton, Levaillant, and others. Reduced. less is known of their state a century ago ; and it would be a long and wearisome task to collect from old voyages the meagre, scattered, and often inaccurate information they contain as to the zoology of these islands. One ex ample may, perhaps, be sufficient. Ledru accompanied an t Birds expedition sent out in 1796 by the French Government to Antilles, the West Indies. In his work he gives a list of the birds he found in the islands of St Thomas and St Croix ( Voyage aux Isles de Teneri/e, &c., Paris, 1810, ii. p. 29). He enumerates fourteen kinds of birds as having occurred to him then. Of these there is now no trace of eight of the number ; and, if he is to be believed, it must be supposed that within fifty or sixty years of his having been assured of their existence, they have become extinct. 1 And yet 1 One of the survivors (a Parrakeet, Conurus xantholcemus) was a the period just mentioned was long subsequent to that in which the primeval woods of the islands were burnt. What, then, must not have been the changes which tho forest- fires produced ] It this be not enough we may cite the case of the French islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique, in which, according to M. Guyon (Comptes Rendus, Ixiii. p. 589), there were once found six species of Psittaci, all now exterminated ; and it may possibly be that the Maccaws stated by Mr Gose (B. Jamaica, p. 260) and Mr Marsh (Proc. Acad. N.S. Philad. 1863, p. 283) to have formerly frequented certain parts of Jamaica, but not apparently noticed there for some twenty-five or thirty years, have fallen victims to colonization and its consequences. Mention has already been made of the Gare-fowl Gare- (Alca impcnnis), whose bones have been found in or Gr the kitchen-middens of Denmark, and more lately ll in similar deposits in Caithness. This species, nearly allied to our common Ilazor-bill (A. torda), flightless and about twice as big, seems to have become extinct since 1844, in which year the last two examples known to have lived were taken on a rocky islet one of a group called Fuglasker, or Fowl- skerries, off the south-west point of -Iceland. Ten years before, one had been caught alive at the entrance of Water- ford harbour; and in 1821 or 1822 one was taken near St Kilda, to which lonely island, as appears from old authors, the bird had been accustomed to resort in the breeding season. In 1812 a pair were killed at Papa- Westray, which was also a breeding station of the species, and the stuffed skin of one of them is preserved in the British Museum, while that of the Waterford specimen may be seen in the museum of Trinity College, Dublin. In the Faeroes the species was formerly common, but it certainly ceased from apj searing there about the beginning of the present century. In the Iceland seas there are three localities called after the bird s name, but on only one of them has it been observed for many years, having probably been as long extirpated in the rest as in the Fseroes. On the locality where it continued latest, there is ample evi dence to show that it once was plentiful. There was a large skerry the Geirfuglasker proper on which, in 1813, the crew of a Fajroese vessel made a descent and slaugh tered a large number of Gare-fowls ; but this, like the rest of the group, was a place very difficult of access, and, in 1821, Faber, the well-known faunist of Iceland, failed to land upon it, though some of his companions reached the Geirfugladrangr, a smaller islet lying further to seaward. In 1830 the large skerry, through a submarine volcanic eruption, disappeared beneath the waves, and immediately after a colony of Gare-fowls was discovered on another rock lying nearer the mainland, and known as Eldey. 2 In the course of the next fourteen years, not fewer probably than sixty birds were killed on this newly-chosen station, and a nearly corresponding number of eggs were brought off ; but the colony gradually dwindled until, as above said, in 1844 the last two were taken (Ibis, 1861, p. 374). In Greenland, for the last three hundred years, the Gare- fowl has only been known as an occasional straggler, but it would appear that in 1374 a party of Icelanders found it so plentiful at a spot on the east coast since identified few years ago restricted to a single hill-top in St Thomas, and so re duced in numbers that the present writer was ridiculed by many of the inhabitants for believing that such a bird ever existed in the island. Found, however, it was at last, but it must be regarded as verging upon extinction. a Whether on the subsidence of the large skerry another portion of the birds which frequented it colonized the outermost islet is not known, for this spot does not seem to have been visited by any human being since Faber s time, more than fifty years ago.