Mr Scot-Skirving on the Natural History of May. 37 



the winters enabling it to procure insect and other food at 

 every season of the year. ISTumerons as pheasants are in 

 many parts of the island, they would be much more so did 

 they not persist in choosing marshy places for their nests, 

 which are frequently flooded during the breeding season. 



Whilst the ornithologist has so frequently to deplore the 

 extinction of breeding-stations, it is pleasant to have to 

 record any instance where some innocent and beautiful bird 

 is found in increased numbers. This I am able to do in 

 reference to the common tern {Sterna liirundo). In the 

 centre of a large loch on the property where I live in 

 summer there is a tiny islet, not more than twice the size of 

 this room, in the centre of which grows a bush of tall sedges. 

 The rest of the ground is flat and bare. About three couple 

 of terns have been in the habit of nesting there. This 

 summer, on approaching the place on the 29th of June, I 

 was surprised to see the islet assume the appearance of a 

 beehive. Hundreds of terns were hovering and screaming 

 round it. Almost every foot of ground was occupied by a 

 tern's nest with eggs, no young ones having then appeared. 

 Among them were the nests of a few black-headed gulls, 

 whilst in the midst of the sedge bush, the apex of the islet, 

 sat a red-breasted merganser on her nest, containing eight 

 eggs. On the 12th July about half of the terns' eggs were 

 hatched, and I found many of the young sickly and many 

 dead, which I attributed, perhaps erroneously, to over- 

 crowding. 



Another island in the lake, not more than a quarter of a 

 mile distant, contained the nests of many of the lesser black- 

 backed gull and a few of the larger black-backs, and I was 

 rather surprised that I never saw these fine but voracious 

 birds visit the islet to relieve it of the supernumerary eggs 

 and young of the terns. A much larger breeding-station of 

 the same species of tern is situated on the sea-coast, a couple 

 of miles distant from the fresh-water loch. From this station 

 a person told me he had taken this season, on one day, 

 sixteen dozen of eggs. ISTumerous though this species is, 

 the beautiful little tern {Sterna minuta) is, so far as my 

 observation goes, a stranger to Islay. It has indeed, I fear, 



