104 SEA-BIRDS 



true of the many miles of the coast of Norfolk and Suffolk, along 

 which, fifty years ago, there was an almost continuous scattered colony 

 of little terns; but now they are very few and far between. An interest- 

 ing comparison of the vulnerability of a shingle or sandy coast and a 

 cliff coast to this advance of man is shown along the coast of Durham 

 and Northumberland. Here the industrial towns and villages, with 

 their huge human populations, run to the very edge of the cliffs. Yet 

 upon the cliffs numbers of sea-birds nest every year and some, like 

 the fulmar, are actually increasing. Of course, there is still human 

 interference, especially by boys and girls making their first tentative 

 experiments in cruelty to animals. But on the whole the cliff birds and 

 the cliff- top men live singularly well together. It is gratifying to note 

 now the shooting of sea-birds at their colonies "for fun," a sport quite 

 widespread in the nineteenth century, has disappeared. 



Man's interference with sea-bird population by what he puts into 

 the sea is quite substantial. It can be benign and malevolent. From 

 the sea-bird's point of view man's benign contributions consist mainly 

 of sewage and fish-offal, and, to a certain extent, whale-offal. Not 

 many important main sewers discharge untreated sewage into the sea 

 in the British Isles, but, in the eastern United States, Roger Peterson 

 writes: "The very best spot for gulls is the sewer outlet at 92nd Street 

 in Brooklyn. For several years now the little gull {Lams minutus) a 

 tiny European species with smoky-black wing linings, has been seen 

 with the buoyant Bonaparte's gulls, snatching titbits that well up in 

 the sordid flow. Here in the Narrows, where immigrants get their 

 first view of the Statue of Liberty, I have seen both this and another 

 European, the black-headed gull. Curiously enough, the only other 

 place on our whole Atlantic coast where these two rare Laridae from 

 the other side can be depended on is also at a sewer outlet, at Newbury- 

 port, Massachusetts. There, for at least ten years, the black-headed 

 gull, which looks like a largish Bonaparte's gull with a red bill, has 

 been found off the end of the pipe that dumps its waste into the 

 Merrimac." 



Fish-offal has been discharged into the sea at fishing ports and 

 villages ever since large-scale fishing began, and such ports have always 

 had their attendant crowd of gulls — mostly herring-gulls and lesser 

 blackbacks and a few great blackbacks. However, in the last few years 

 the trawlers have been operating at increasing distances from land, have 

 been taking ice with them, and have been gutting and stowing their 

 catch at sea. This has meant that at every trawl there has been a great 



