TERCEL—TERN 955 
(Hoopor). In the Cuvierian 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 (Faun. Orn. Eur. occid. 
fasc. xxiii.), who referred to it Oriolidx, Upupidx, Tichadromadida, 
Certhiide and Sittide. 
TERCEL and TIERCEL (corruptly Tarsen and TasseEx), Fr. 
Tiercelet, the male of many Birds-of-Prey ;1 but especially of those 
used in Falconry—except the GyRFALCON, Hoppy, 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 (cf. Schlegel, Zrait. de la Fauconnerie, p. 1, 
note 3). 
TERMAGANT or TERMIGANT, the earliest English and 
Scottish forms of the name now written PTARMIGAN (cf. GROUSE, 
p. 392, note). 
TERN (Norsk Texrne, Tenne or Tende; Swedish Térna; Dutch 
Stern”), the name now applied generally to a group of sea-birds, the 
Sternine of modern ornithology, but, according to Selby, properly 
belonging, at least in the Farne 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 
dougalli; the other is the Black Tern, Hydrochelidon nigra, belonging 
1 Chaucer applies the name to an EAGLE (Parlement of Fowles, line 393). 
2 STARN 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 Sraruine (p. 903). To Turner’s name, repeated by Gesner and 
other authors, we owe the introduction by Linneus of Sterna into scientific 
nomenclature. ‘‘Ikstern” is another Dutch form of the word. 
