Page:Essays on Early Ornithology and Kindred Subjects.djvu/49

Rh been found on the Ile Aride, which is now known as Crozet Island, and the whole group as the Crozet Islands. The Cape Petrel (Daption capensis) nests on Tristan da Cunha and Kerguelen Island. A Cormorant (Phalacrocorax verrucosus) inhabits Kerguelen Island, but its occurrence on the Crozet Islands is doubtful. Finally, Crozet saw on the island on which he landed a white bird, which he mistook for a white pigeon, and argues that a country producing seeds for the nurture of pigeons must exist in the vicinity. This bird was probably the Sheath-bill (Chionarchus crozettensis) of the Crozet Islands.

The next land visited was Tasmania, where the vessels cast anchor on the east side of the island. Like their Dutch predecessors, the French mariners bestowed the names of European birds upon the birds which they saw in these new lands, and it would be an idle task to seek the equivalents of the ousels, thrushes, and turtle-doves which Crozet saw in Tasmania. There can be no doubt, however, about his pelicans, for Pelecanus conspicillatus still nests on the east coast of the island or on islets adjacent to the coast.

The duration of Crozet's sojourn in New Zealand was about four months in the autumn and winter of 1772. The vessels anchored in the Bay of Islands. Crozet has given a long enumeration of the birds which he saw in New Zealand. We will not seek to find what his wheatears and wagtails, starlings and larks, ousels and thrushes may have been, but we may make an exception in favour of his black thrushes with white tufts ('grives noires à huppes blanches'). These birds were evidently Tuis (Prosthemadura Novæ-Zealandiæ).

Crozet distributes the birds which he saw in New Zealand under four heads, as birds of the forest, of the lakes, of the open country, and of the sea-coast. In the forests were Wood Pigeons