280 Lord Lilford — Notes on 



an Audouin. We found that some Neapolitan fishermen 

 had harried the nearest of the Barretini isles^ and we made 

 out their boat oflF the outlying one ; so we had to content 

 ourselves wdth our luncheon and pipes, and the sight of many- 

 Herring Gulls screaming over their pillaged nests, whilst a 

 Raven scolded at ns from a crag, and the never-failing Blue 

 Rock Thrushes piped their low sweet song. The next day we 

 went off in a south-easterly direction to Capo di Ferro, on 

 the mainland of Sardinia, but, with the exception of bagging 

 one of four Audouin's Gulls, adding Grey Crow and Common 

 Bee-eater to our Straits' list of birds observed, and the cap- 

 ture of a small but very brilliantly coloured specimen of 

 Zamenis atroviretis, we did nothing. A small colony of Bee- 

 eaters were at work on a sandy bank near the head of the 

 Bay of Arraquena, but had not, so far as we could ascertain, 

 begun to lay. The lovely weather and the fine wild scenery 

 of the Sardinian coast amply made up for our want of success ; 

 but the main object of our visit to these wilds — i. e., the 

 finding of a breeding-place of Audouin''s Gull — was still un- 

 attained, and as our time was drawing short and the eggs in 

 the ovaries of the female birds shot by us were very minute, 

 I began to lose hope on this subject. However, on the next 

 morning we set off to explore the islands of Spargi and Spar- 

 giotto — the former, a high ridge of rock opposite to the 

 western side of Maddalena, sloping gently to the sea on its 

 eastern side, whilst its west front consists of high precipitous 

 and jagged cliffs, the eastern slopes being thickly overgrown 

 with scrub almost to the water's edge, with here and there a 

 little sandy creek and small patches of coarse grass. On 

 approaching one of these spots from the eastward, we became 

 aware of a group of some twenty- five or thirty Audouin's 

 Gulls clustered on the point of a little promontory ; the birds 

 rose and circled over our boat with loud outcries, somewhat 

 resembling those of the Mediterranean Herring Gull, but 

 more plaintive. I believe that we might have shot the whole 

 colony, but I only wanted three to make up a dozen speci- 

 mens, and these three were secured in as many minutes. 

 Four or five of our party landed and explored the slopes of 



