THE PETRELS AND THE STORM.
IF any evidence of the fury of the equinoctial storms that have lately raged in the Atlantic were needed, in addition to the lengthening list of " Disasters at Sea " which has appeared daily during the past three weeks, we might find it in the number of ocean-birds which have been driven from distant seas, and even from other continents, or the New World itself, and have drifted to the rain-soaked fields of England. No doubt all shore-birds are liable to be driven inland during a gale ; but these are rarely, if ever, lost in a storm. Every seagull and cormorant, puffin or razor-bill, has its own home, the particular shelf or ledge of cliff on which it sleeps every night, and from which it launches itself over the sea when the first streak of dawn appears upon the waters. But these are only " long-shore" birds that can lie snug in harbour, like their rivals the fishermen, in a gale of wind, and suffer, like them, mainly from the interruption of their fishing.
When the true ocean-birds, like the petrels, are found scattered inland, dead or dying, as has been the case during the past month, we may safely infer that the weather from side to side of the Atlantic has borne hardly not only on the ships, but on the friendly birds that love to follow them. Numbers of these, of at least two different kinds, one of which, as a rule, makes the Azores the eastern limit of its ocean range, have appeared on our coasts or inland during the gales. Wilson's petrel has been seen in Ireland, in County Down, and a second is said to have been shot on Lough Erne. The fork-tailed petrel, another ocean species, has lately appeared here in far greater numbers. These birds have been seen in Donegal, and in Argyllshire, in Westmoreland, and in the Cleveland district in Yorkshire. As the last appeared after a strong north-westerly gale, it seems that it must not only have come in from the Atlantic, but have flown over England before falling exhausted to the ground. They have also been seen in Mayo, in Tipperary, at Limerick, Dumfries, and Northampton. From an account given of these petrels in Argyllshire, it is clear that they retained after their long journey all that misplaced confidence in man which marks their behaviour when accompanying ships in mid-ocean. After five had been shot by the owner of a yacht in Loch Melfort, they settled on the vessel, and one allowed itself to be caught under the sou'- wester hat of a sailor.
As we have said, the petrels are true ocean-birds, living by choice far from land, in the " uttermost parts of the sea." Perhaps their favourite haunt is the great Southern Ocean beyond the Tropics. There, at any rate, is the main nesting-place of Wilson's petrel, on the Island of Kerguelen. They also lay their eggs at the southern points of Nova Scotia; but though they join and accompany the ships in the mid-passage to and from Europe, they say " Good- bye !" at the Azores, as the stormy-petrels did to Tom the Water-Baby when he reached the ice-pack, and nothing but the extremity of distress could force Lltem to the English shore.
Perhaps the strangest instance of the forced wandering of a petrel was that which brought one of the last-known members of an extinct, or at any rate a lost species, the capped petrel, whose only home appears to have been the islands of St. Domingo and Gnadaloupe, from the West India seas to a Norfolk heath. In March or April, 1850, a bird was seen by a boy on a heath at Southacre, in Norfolk, flapping from one furze-bush to .another, until it crept into one, and was there caught by him. Exhausted as it was, it violently bit his hand, and he there- upon killed it. A Mr. Newcome, one of a race of falconers, happened to be hawking in the neighbourhood, and his falconer, seeing the boy with the dead bird, brought it to his master, by whom it was skinned and stuffed, and placed in the New- come collection, where it still remains. It was a large bird, about 16 in. in length, with the long, curved wings charac- teristic of all the petrels, and a black head, as its name indicates
Only two other instances of the capped petrel's appearance in Europe are known. One was shot near Boulogne, and one 'in Hungary in 1870, which is in the Museum of Buda-Pesth. Two others have been taken in the United States. But the strangest part of the story is that the capped petrels are now -either extinct, or lost to the knowledge of man. " It is certain," says Mr. Stevenson in his last and unfinished volume of "The Birds of Norfolk," "that the true home of this very rare .species is, or was, in the islands of Guadaloupe and Dominica, in the West Indies, where it was formerly very abundant ; but one of its old breeding-places in the last-named of these islands was explored, without finding a single bird, in February, 1887, by Colonel Feilden." It appears that ten years before, not only Dominica, but also Guadaloupe was searched in vain for the " Diablotins," the name by which these petrels were known to the old voyagers. It is believed that they were possibly destroyed by a South American -opossum which was introduced to the island ; but as the young and even the old birds were constantly caught by the islanders for food in the holes in which they nested, their destruction may be due, like that of the great auk, to human greediness.
At first it seems difficult to believe that the petrels, gifted with such powers of flight that, like their first-cousins the albatrosses, they make the central ocean their chosen home, should so far succumb to the Atlantic storms as to fall wholly under the dominion of the wind, and drift for thousands of miles to unknown and inhospitable shores. But any one who has watched the flight of a " lost" bird in a gale on land may form some idea of the danger to which the petrels are exposed when a hurricane bursts in the Atlantic. Near Oxford, when the last gale was at its height, the writer was watching the "centre boards " rushing up and down over the floods on Port Meadow, with a strong current and the wind on their quarters ; the geese were flying over the flood to avoid the canoes and small craft ; and the wind was blowing a full gale from the south-west, with a brilliant sun, occasionally hidden by a white, drifting cloud. Far away to the north was a long-winged bird, beating up against the wind. At one time it rose high in the air, facing the gale ; then it descended with a rapid swoop progressing westwards, but at the same time "falling off" still further to the north. It was a young herring-gull, its chequered grey-and-white plumage showing clearly in the bright light as it approached. It was easy to conjecture from the gull's flight the power of storms to drive birds from the course which they aim at. The bird's point was clearly westward. It used every shelter and every lull of the wind to make it ; but the gale was too powerful, and it appeared that it must either stay on the inhospitable land until the wind dropped, work its way slowly to the west with a rapid drift to the north, or abandon its struggle and drift with the wind. But all birds seem to have an instinctive knowledge that if they once surrender to the force of the wind, and allow them- selves to drift like leaves, there are unknown dangers in store for them. They will hardly ever do so unless to escape pursuit, and then only for a few minutes, when their pace is so marvellously rapid that, in the case of land-birds, a few minutes is sufficient to carry them out of the district they know into others from which they will perhaps never find their way back to the fields which are their native home. In the gale on September 1st of the present year, the writer saw a successful effort made by partridges to avoid the conse- quences of thus abandoning themselves to the gale. A covey of very strong birds, which had been hatched on the highest part of the Berkshire Downs, was flushed down- wind, and, rising high in the air, the whole brood were carried in a few seconds to the extreme edge of the hill, below which was a sudden fall of some 300 ft. into a country quite unknown to these hill-birds. As they ap- proached the limit of their own district, the partridges made an extraordinary effort to release themselves from the power of the wind, and to avoid being forced over the hill-top. Closing their wings, they sank almost to the ground, and so gained the slight shelter of a low bank. This enabled them to wheel, and so to face the gale. Even then they might not have achieved their object, had not a small thorn-bush broken the force of the wind just on the edge of the down. The whole covey used the respite so given, and skimming up almost in single file, they alighted one by one behind the bush, on the extreme limit of their native ground. But recent instances are not wanting in which partridges have been carried out to sea when drifting on the wind. At Sizewell, in Suffolk, nine partridges were blown out to sea, and dropped in the water some four hundred yards from the shore ; and in another case thirteen of the " red-legged " variety attempted the flight across the estuary of the Stour, and falling exhausted, were picked up by some boatmen fishing for " dabs," a welcome and unlooked-for haul. But perhaps the most remarkable instance of land-birds being carried to sea by the wind, just as the ocean-dwelling petrels are drifted over the land, is that recorded in the last century of a flight of wood- cocks, which drifted over England, and dropped in hun- dreds into the sea beyond Cornwall and the Scilly Islands. Probably they had started from Norway against a gentle southerly wind, and had then been caught in mid- air by a gale from the east. The fresh impetus so given had carried them on far beyond their usual halting-place on the East Coast, and the sight of the Atlantic had warned them at last to alight. But the descent had been miscalculated, and falling off before the wind, like the sea-gull on Port Meadow, they overshot the coast. Exhausted by their long flight, and unable to rise against the wind and tack for the mainland, the birds struggled to the Scilly Islands or perished in the sea. But mishaps of this kind indicate no such stress of storm as the appearance on our shores of the ocean-loving petrels, to whom, rather than to the "cormorants, ducks, and gulls," Clough's appeal to the sea-birds more nearly applies :-
" Ye over stormy seas leading long and dreary processions,
Ye, too, brood of the wind, whose coining is whence we discern not, Making your nest on the wave, and your home on the crested billow, fill ye my imagination !
Let us not talk of Growth!! We are still in our Aqueous Ages!"
Previous page
