84 THE SCOTTISH NATURALIST 



THE SANDWICH TERN {STERNA CANTIACA) 

 IN "DEE": GENERAL STATUS AND FIRST 

 NESTING RECORD. 



By A Landsborough Thomson, M.A., M.B.O.U. 



While publishing what appears to be the first record of the 

 breeding of the Sandwich Tern {Sterna cantiaca) within the 

 faunal area of " Dee," I take the opportunity of discussing 

 the question of the general status of the species in the district, 

 apart from this single isolated event. This is the more 

 necessary owing to the incompleteness of the only published 

 information on the subject. In his Vertebrate Fauna of 

 "Dee" (1903, p. 180), the late Mr George Sim described the 

 Sandwich Tern as " an irregular visitor " : he records that 

 " In 1864, numbers appeared in the end of July and beginning 

 of August about the mouth of the Don, when 12 specimens 

 were obtained, mostly young birds. Again, in 1866, from the 

 15th July onwards, for about ten days, a number appeared 

 about the same place." Between 1866 and 1903 he had "not 

 seen or heard of any others " ! The only other local records 

 I know of are Thomas Edward's statement, " observed a pair 

 this summer, 1854," and a note by the Rev. William Serle in 

 the Annals of Scottish Natural History (1906, p. 239), to the 

 effect that he had a single record for the neighbourhood of 

 Peterhead (no date), and that on 27th July 1906 he saw 

 " quite a fair-sized flock " at the Loch of Strathbeg (which is 

 close to the sea, near Rattray Head), which he suspected to 

 have bred in the vicinity. 



But during the past few years we have come to know the 

 Sandwich Tern as a regular spring and autumn visitor in 

 small numbers to the coast near Aberdeen. We have even 

 a number of summer records, culminating in the finding of a 

 nest and egg at a local colony of Common Terns and Black- 

 headed Gulls on nth June 1910. The following is a 

 summary of our records of the species since we first 

 identified it in the autumn of 1907. Most of the observa- 

 tions were made by my friend Mr Lewis N. G. Ramsay, M.A., 



