RINGED PLOVER. 87 
Yarmouth sands, laying its eggs about June in the sand 
and shinele;” and, from his time until within the last 
forty or fifty years, it was no doubt plentifully distributed 
during the breeding season over our entire coast-line, 
either nesting on the sea-shore or in close vicinity 
to the sea, on the margins of our tidal streams. Of 
late years, however, on the coast, as on the warrens, 
their numbers have sensibly decreased, and from causes, 
which must, I fear, eventually lead to their extinction 
as shore breeders—the wholesale plundering of their 
nests, for edible purposes as well as for the cabinets of 
collectors, and the even less justifiable destruction of the 
birds themselves during the summer months. In the 
neighbourhood of Yarmouth, as at Horsey and Win- 
terton, there are many localities where they bred freely 
in former times, but which are now entirely deserted ; 
and unquestionably the increased population of our 
watering places, and for the most part the easy access 
to them by railroad from the large inland towns and 
cities, have all tended to destroy the retirement of such 
somewhat ancient date, as we find it thus used in two instances 
in the Hunstanton “accounts”—‘It. pd to ye fowler (xxiiij 
weke 1525) at Corbetts for uj duss and di of stynts, v spowes, 
lij whyte plovs, and i redshanks, and i sedotterells xvyj4. 
Also, in the vjth weke, 1533, “Itm ij sedotterells uj4-” Sir 
Thomas Browne also uses this name in some of his letters, but 
there is little reason to doubt, from his own description of the bird, 
that the “ Morinellus marinus or sea-dotterel,” of which he sent a 
draft to Dr. Merritt on the 6th of February, 1668, (see Wilkin’s 
edition of his works, vol. 1, pp. 403 and 405), was in reality the 
turnstone (Strepsilas interpres). In Ray’s edition of Willughby’s 
“Ornithology,” we also find, apart from the notice of the “ sea-lark 
(Charadrius sive hiaticula)” [Book iii., p. 311], a tolerably accurate 
description of “The Turnstone or Sea-Dottrel: Morinellus marinus, 
of Sir Thomas Brown,” to which the editor, alluding to their 
appearance on the Norfolk coast, adds—“ Our honoured friend, 
Sir Thomas Brown, of Norwich, sent us the picture of this bird 
by the title of the Sea-Dottrel.” 
