Excerpt, page 622: “Because the photographs of the May 1996 bird on Sable Island do not easily accord with either of the two regularly occurring skua species, we have been led to consider other possibilities. For several decades, skuas outwardly similar to the Sable Island bird have led observers in the North Atlantic to suspect that a third species, Brown Skua (Catharacta antarctica [Stercorarius antarcticus]) wanders to the North Atlantic. This suspicion has been supported by recent molecular evidence from the United Kingdom (Scott 2002, Moon and Carrington 2002). Information on skua identification, in both published articles and material posted on the WorldWideWeb, has indicated to us that the Sable Island bird strongly resembled Brown Skua, although deficiencies in this information lead us to leave it formally unidentified.”
