Page:The Zoologist, 3rd series, vol 2 (1878).djvu/340

316 the same species. In the North Atlantic and Baffin Bay the blue and light varieties occur in the proportion of about one to ten ; but I never saw a blue-plumaged bird captured, the light-coloured and more powerful birds buffeting the others from the bait.

Kittiwakes, Rissa tridactyla, all immature birds, followed the vessel in June some 150 miles from the Irish coast, and then left. As we approached within fifty miles of the shores of Greenland they again came round the ship. In autumn this species appears distributed over the entire North Atlantic; I observed them daily between Cape Farewell and Ireland.

In mid-Atlantic a single Arctic Tern, Sterna macrura, approached the ship during a gale of wind. It seemed tired, and settled on an empty cask which was thrown overboard.

In summer Puffinus major is abundant about the fifty-ninth parallel, off Cape Farewell, and has received from the whalers the name of "Cape Hen." A second and smaller species is equally common, which Mr. Dresser, from my description, surmises, no doubt correctly, to be Puffinus griseus. In autumn the range of the Greater Shearwater extends over the North Atlantic from the latitude of Cape Farewell to the coast of Kerry.

Small Petrels often followed in the track of the vessel, but as no example was captured I am not certain of the species. None were noticed to the northward of lat. 57°, two degrees to the south of Cape Farewell.

The Fulmars, Petrels and Gulls that follow a ship disperse and quit the wake of the vessel at nightfall. I frequently remained on deck dining the middle watch to notice at what hour the sea-birds reappeared. The first to return were the small Petrels; some of these arrived with the glimpse of dawn, and might be seen hawking like Martins round the ship. Then a Fulmar or two came flying towards the vessel from different points of the compass, arriving in twos and threes until the usual assemblage had congregated in its wake. Sea-birds, according to my observation, do not follow a ship during the hours of darkness or in moonlight.

As we neared the coast of Greenland, in the latitude of Cape Desolation, we first encountered ice. It consisted of fragments of ancient floes, or ice formed on the surface of the sea by direct congelation. The term "floe" is applied by Arctic navigators to this description of ice. A "floe" may be miles in extent or only a few acres in size. The term "iceberg" or "berg" is applied