LARUS RIDIBUNDUS. OL 
§ 4529. Twelve.—Scoulton Mere, 1849-52. From Messrs. 
A. & E. Newton, 1852. 
[This selection was sent to Mr. Wolley at his particular request with a 
statement nearly as follows :—“ Six present the normal appearance of the egg, 
and the varieties indicated by the several specimens occur in about equal 
numbers—the very darkly-marked and light-crounded being in a slight 
minority. Of the rest the Sandwich-Tern like variety is not unfiequent, nor 
is the light blue’ and dark-spotted one—these two being perhaps in the pro- 
portion of one to thirty. Two others exhibit varieties which occur towards 
the close of the season, and are probably produced by the exhaustion of the 
bird’s powers. (One of these is very like the egg of a Kittiwake.—J.W.) The 
remaining two are accidental varieties cf shape and size, and in one, case of 
colour—the coffee-coloured ground being of rare occurrence. These last two 
were taken in the years 1849 and 1851 respectively, all the rest having been 
selected in May 1852. On the last-mentioned occasion, upwards of three 
thousand eggs were collected, but it is difficult to say from how many the 
present specimens were chosen, owing to the egys being packed in baskets of 
from one to twenty score, and many of these were left undisturbed. However, 
this may be taken as a good series, though one variety—a deep brown mottled 
all over with a darker shade of the same colour,—hbeing rare, is omitted. Eges 
of monstrous shapes are also often met with, such as specimens having two 
great ends, and others shaped like flasks.”} 
§ 4530. Zwo.—Horn, land, 10 June, 1856. “J. W.” 
From the place where especially the Little Gull, Larus minudus, has 
9 
been said to breed to the exclusion of L. ridibundus?. 
1 [Colour entirely gone now. July 1904.—Ep.] 
* [As stated in the ‘Memoir’ (page xxxii) prefixed to the first volume of this 
work, Mr. Wolley was induced to go to CEland and Gottland in 1856 by the 
report, which he heard the autumn before in Gottenburg, of the successes 
obtained in those islands by a Swedish naturalist, and especially of his haying 
found Larus minutus breeding in the former of them. This information was 
received from Herr Malm, and, I believe, had not then been published ; but it 
soon after appeared in print (Gotheborgs K. Vet. och Vitt. Samh. Handlingar, 
Heft 3, 1855, pp. 64-71), the author being Herr Carl Agardh Westerlund, who a 
dozen years afterwards (Skandinavisk Oologi, pp. 1384, 135) repeated the state- 
ment, though then adding that having found the species breeding in C#land in 
1852, it had vanished when he revisited the locality in 1865. But Herr Westerlund 
did not refer to the fact of his not having met with ZL. ridibundus breeding in the 
island in 1852, when he seems to have considered it only an autumnal migrant. 
It did not appear to Mr. Wolley that this species had replaced the other, but 
only that the commoner one had been mistaken for the rarer. Both he and 
Mr. Hudleston in 1856 searched for the latter in every likely spot, and particularly 
in those named by Herr Westeriund, but all in vain,—Ep. | 
