TERCEL— TERN 955 



(Hoopoe). In the Cuviei-ian sense it has since been largely em- 

 ployed, and can hardly be said to have been wholly dropped 

 except by those who have some knowledge of real characters, for 

 it was used in 1888 by Olphe-Galliard {Fcmn. Orn. Eur. occid. 

 fasc. xxiii.), who referred to it Oriolidse, Upupidse, Tichadromadidx, 

 Certhiidse and Sittidae. 



TEECEL and TIERCEL (corruptly Tarsel and Tassel), Fr. 

 Tiercelet, the male of many Birds-of-Prey ; ^ but- especially of those 

 used in Falconry — except the GtYrfalcon, Hobby, Lanner, Merlin, 

 Sacre and Sparrow-hawk. It is commonly thought to signify 

 that a Hawk of that sex was " a third part lesse then the female " 

 (Cotgrave) ; but some writers, as Tardif and De Thou, maintain that 

 it referred to a belief that every brood of Hawks consists of 3 birds, 

 whereof 2 were females and the 3rd was a male, or that this 

 was the last hatched (c/. Schlegel, Trait, de la Fauconnerie, p. 1, 

 note 3). 



TERMAGANT or TERMIGANT, the earliest English and 

 Scottish forms of the name now written Ptarmigan (c/. Grouse, 

 p. 392, note). 



TERN (Norsk Txrne, Tenne or Tende ; Swedish Tama ; Dutch 

 Stern ^), the name now applied genei^ally to a group of sea-birds, the 

 Sterniiix of modern ornithology, but, according to Selby, properly 

 belonging, at least in the Fame Islands, to the species known by 

 the book-name of Sandwich Tern, all the others being those called 

 Sea-Swallows — a name still most commonly given to the whole 

 group throughout Britain from their long wings, forked tail and 

 marine habit. In Willughby's Ornithologia (1676), however, the 

 word Tern is used for more than one species, and, though it does 

 not appear in the older English dictionaries, it may well have been 

 from early times as general a name as it is now. 



Setting aside those which are but occasional visitors to the 

 British Islands, six species of Terns may be regarded as indigenous, 

 though of them one has ceased from ordinarily breeding in the 

 United Kingdom, while a second has become so rare and regularly 

 appears in so few places that mention of them must for prudence 

 sake be avoided. This last is the beautiful Roseate Tern, Sterna 

 doiigalli ; the other is the Black Tern, Hydrochelidon nigra, belonging 



^ Chaucer applies the name to an Eagle {Parlement of Fowles, line 393). 



^ Stakn was used in Norfolk in the middle of this century for the bird known 

 by the book-name of Black Tern, thus confirming Turner, who, in 1544, described 

 [sub cap. "De Gavia") that species as "nostrati lingua sterna appellata." In 

 at least one instance the word has been confounded with one of the old forms 

 of the modern Staeling (p. 903). To Turner's name, repeated by Gesner and 

 other authors, we owe the introduction by Linnseus of Sterna into scientific 

 nomenclatm'e. ' ' Ikstern " is another Dutch form of the word. 



