BIRDS OF ESSEX COUNTY. IO3 



Eggs: June 14 to July 19. 



The average date of arrival of this bird for five years at Milk Island, off the 

 end of Cape Ann, is May i8th. It is rarely seen after the end of September. 

 As a rule, only single birds appear in October, yet on October i6th, 1904, I 

 counted 89 in a flock on Ipswich Beach. A week later, on the 23d, I was again 

 at the beach and saw 30 or 40 of these birds, and again, on October 30th, there 

 were about a dozen. These are in my experience unusually late dates to see so 

 many of these Terns. The weather had been unusually mild. 



The Common Tern once bred on all the rocky islands and back of all the 

 sandy beaches on the Essex County coast. The latter breeding places have 

 long since been abandoned. Mr. C. J. Maynard found from fifty to a hundred 

 breeding in the Ipswich dunes between 1868 and 1872, after which latter date 

 it is doubtful if they continued there. The rocky islands were less subject to 

 the invasion of man, and the birds have continued longer to breed there. 

 Nuttall,! in 1834, speaks of thirty or forty pairs breeding annually at Egg Rock, 

 off Nahant. They formerly bred on Great Egg Rock, off the Manchester shore. 

 This island is a mass of rock rising in places twenty or thirty feet above the 

 water, and is of about an acre in extent. Here and there are a few patches of 

 pebbles or of coarse grass, but it is for the most part bare rock. On July 19th, 

 1876, I found a hundred or more Common, with perhaps some Arctic Terns 

 breeding here. The eggs were laid in slight indentations in the rock or in 

 slight hollows among the pebbles, with usually a few straws for form's sake 

 beneath the eggs. In one case the nest was more elaborate, being made of 

 small pieces of driftwood and straws and placed in a hollow among the pebbles. 

 Eggs even at this late July date were abundant, either two or three in about 

 equal proportions, one in one case, four in another. Two years later, on again 

 visiting the rock, only two or three pairs were found and they have since aban- 

 doned the place. Up to 1889, Mr. C. E. Brown found them breeding at Cherry 

 Island. 



The Common Tern still breeds at Milk Island, off the end of Cape Ann, to 

 the number of about fifty pairs of late years. Milk Island is an irregular triangle 

 of eight or ten acres in extent, flanked by ledges and a sea-wall of pebbles, 

 boulders, and broken rocks thrown up by the storms. This encloses a marshy 

 area in which grow bulrushes, elder, and bayberry bushes. At the southern 

 angle there is a broad surface of broken rock and boulders above the reach of 

 ordinary tides, and here it is that the Terns breed. 



Notwithstanding the close proximity of their breeding station. Common 



' Thomas Nuttall : A Manual of the Ornithology of the United States and of Canada, vol. 2, 

 p. 273, 1834. 



