The Natural History of Selborne

On this day Lord Stawell sent me a rare & curious water-fowl, taken alive a few days before by a boy at Basing, near Basingstoke, & sent to the Duke of Bolton at Hackwood park, where it was put into the bason before the house, in which it soon dyed.  This bird proved to be the Procellaria Puffinus of Linnaeus, the Manks puffin, or Shear-water of Ray.  Shear-waters breed in the Calf of Man, & as Ray supposes, in the Scilly Isles, & also in the Orkines: but quit our rocks & shores about the latter end of August; & from accounts lately given by navigators, are dispersed over the whole Atlantic.  By what chance or accident this bird was impelled to visit Hants is a question that can not easily be answered.