XEMA SABINLI.
Sabine’s Gull.

Larus Sabini, Sab. Linn. Trans., vol. xii. p- 520, pl. 29.
Xema Sabini, Leach, in Ross’s Voy., App., p. lvii, with fig.
— collaris, Leach.

Gavia Sabini, Macgill. Man. Nat. Hist., Orn., vol. ii. p. 241.

 

SEVERAL instances of the occurrence of this species in the British Islands are on record. The late
Mr. Thompson exhibited to the Linnean Society, on the 15th of April, 1834, a specimen which had been
killed in Belfast Bay on the 18th of September, 1822; the collection of Mr. Rodd of Penzance has been
enriched by at least two examples ; another was shot in Belfast Bay in September 1834; a fifth in Dublin
Bay in October 1837 ; a sixth at Milford Haven in 1839 ; a seventh at Newhaven, in Sussex, in December
1853 ; and Mr. Murray A. Mathews has seen two at Weston-super-Mare, in Somersetshire, which had been
killed on Weston Sands a year or two previously. All these specimens are immature, affording additional
evidence that young birds wander much further from their homes than adults.

This beautiful species of Gull was described for the first time in the twelfth volume of the Transactions
of the Linnean Society ’ by the late Joseph Sabine, Esq., from specimens sent to this country by his brother,
Captain (now General) Sabine, President of the Royal Society, who accompanied the expedition of 1818 in
search of a north-west passage. ‘They were met with by Captain Sabine and killed by him on the 25th
of July 1818, on a group of three rocky islands, each about a mile across, off the west coast of Greenland,
twenty miles distant from the mainland, in latitude 75° 29'N., and longitude 60° 9'W. They were associated
in considerable numbers with Arctic Terns, breeding on those islands, the nests of both birds being inter-
mingled. This Gull lays two eggs, on the bare ground; these are hatched in the last week in July: the
young are mottled at first with brown and dull yellow. The eggs are an inch and a half in length and of
regular shape, not much pointed; the colour is olive blotched with brown. The parent birds flew with
impetuosity towards those who approached their nest and young; and when one bird of a pair was killed,
its mate, though frequently fired at, continued on wing close to the spot where it lay. They get their food
on the sea-beach, standing near the water’s edge and picking up the marine insects which are cast on
shore.” <‘* A solitary individual,” says Swainson, ‘‘ was seen in Prince Regent’s Inlet, on Sir Edward Parry’s
first voyage ; and many specimens were procured in the course of the second voyage, on Melville Peninsula ;
so that it is a pretty general summer visitor to the arctic seas, and is entitled to be enumerated amongst
the European as well as American birds. It arrives in the high northern latitudes in June, and retires to
the southward in August. When newly killed, they have a delicate pink blush on the under surface ”
(Fauna Boreali-Americana, vol. il. p. 428). Specimens are also said to have been obtained at Spitzbergen,
Igloolik, Behring’s Straits, Cape Garry, and Felix Harbour; and some Esquimaux told Captain James C.
Ross that it breeds in great numbers on the lowland west of Neityelle. It seems likely that there is some
mistake with respect to the statement that this bird has been procured at Spitzbergen ; for Mr. Newton, in
his notes on the birds of that country, remarks that Dr. Malmgren, who has thoroughly explored a very
large extent of it, and especially the locality in which the bird was said to have been found, did not meet
with any trace of it.

Little has been recorded respecting the breeding-places of the Xema Sadini; but that the coasts of
Greenland, Hudson’s Bay, and the fur-countries of America are the places principally resorted to for this
purpose, there can be little doubt.

The collectors employed by the Smithsonian Institution at Washington are understood to have lately
met with this bird breeding in considerable numbers ; but it is to the intrepid Siberian explorer, Von
Middendorff, that naturalists as yet owe their only specimens of its eggs which have yet reached European
collections. One of these was exhibited by Mr. Alfred Newton to the Zoological Society at their meeting
on the 10th of December, 1861, accompanied by the following remarks :—“ The ruins of an egg of this rare
Gull were sent to me by Dr. Baldamus. He obtained them from Von Middendorff, who found the species
on the Jakes of the Zundras and the little islets at the mouth of the Taimyr, breeding abundantly in company
with the Arctic Tern (Sterna macrura, Naum.), as General Sabine had done twenty years previously on the
islands in Melville Bay. . . . Whether any specimens were brought home by the first discoverer of this
species I do not know; if so, it is probable they no longer in nies though it is clear, from the
accounts given in the ‘ Transactions of the Linnean Society ’ (vol. xii. p. 520), that many might have been