Sea-Birds: An Introduction to the Natural History of the Sea-Birds of the North Atlantic
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: B0000CISTA
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
London published Natural History
has not been proved that puffins have a sense of smell. The olfactory sense of sea-birds has been little explored, see Fisher, 1952, pp. 421–22. and notes on cormorants devouring strong-smelling fish, see here). The newly-hatched puffin is fed first of all on very small fish and sand-eels. As it grows older, larger quantities of larger-sized fish are brought in, but, as already pointed out, these fish are never so large as those fed to guillemot chicks. The ability of the puffin to catch and
taken place in Antarctica and in the neighbouring sectors of the South Pacific. The great order of Tubinares the albatrosses, petrels and shearwaters, probably originated in what is now the South Pacific. Nobody knows exactly how many species belong to this order, as there is a good deal of disorder in the published systematics of this very difficult group; but the number is certainly eighty-six, and may be over ninety. Of these fifty-four breed in the South Pacific, twenty-seven in the
behaviour. So far the available evidence appears to uphold Mayr’s view—at all events, for birds. During the present century much systematic work in the description and measurement of birds has been conducted in American and European museums, and much practical and theoretical work on evolution has also been done. But it needed the persuasions of Mayr and Julian Huxley (1942), amongst a few others, to collate the work of the systematists and the evolutionary zoologists. Sea-birds lend themselves
trees and bushes and is limited to breeding on islands which can provide them. While their food habits have not been closely compared it seems clear, from the account of Murphy (1936) that they are different; the blue-faced booby appears to be primarily an eater of small squids, the brown booby an eater of flying-fish and many other species of surface-fish, the red-footed booby primarily a diurnal eater of flying-fish but also a nocturnal feeder on squids. If we study the skuas, gulls and terns
between the sexes of sea-birds in the field—for even the act of coition is sometimes reversed. Mutual display—leading to mutual stimulation—is advantageous where there is such outward uniformity. It is interesting to trace the origins of sexual display. In courtship all sea-birds make use of the bill in rubbing, fencing, scissorsing, fondling or preening motions; in doing so they are unconsciously copying the familiar movements of feeding and being fed as chicks. Gaping is a characteristic of