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Puffinus Creatopus in Alamenda County, California

W. Otto Emerson

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On July 7, 1906, I was driving along the main road, home from a trip to the Santa Clara Valley, when, about three miles from Irvington and sixteen miles from Haywards, at the side of the road I saw what at first glance appeared to be a gull. It was lying directly under the telegraph wires, a strange place, I thought, for a gull to be seen at this time of the summer and still more, so far from the bay shore, at least six miles off. I was about to pass on, when the idea struck me that I had better identify the species. On picking up the bird, my surprise was complete, as I recognized it to be an ocean straggler, a shearwater instead of a gull.

On arriving home and skinning the bird, I found it very poor, an adult male in moulting condition. The only way I could account for this shearwater (Puffinus creatopus) straying so far from its natural surroundings, is that we had been having. for a week preceding, unusually thick fogs that had extended from the ocean inland for sixty miles or more. No fogs for many years had been so heavy and lasting all thru the day. This shearwater must have lost its bearings in the fogs along the ocean coast, which about opposite would be in the neighborhood of Pigeon Point or Pescadero Beach, some fifty miles or more in a bee-line from where the bird lay. It must have passed over the Coast Range into the Bay region, wandered about until it came down lower to sight the land, and struck against the mass of telegraph wires and was killed by the contact. On skinning the bird, I found a line or dent across the front of the skull.

That oceanic birds often get lost in the fogs, if they have not the coast line to go by, is thought to be a fact from recent investigation by Mr. I. M. Loomis on Monterey Bay. (See Calif. Water Birds No. IV, page 303.)

Haywards, California.

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