296 LARID.E. 



of my head. They then rose vertically above me for 50 or 60 

 feet, and after flying back towards the nest returned to renew the 

 assaults. The more timid of the birds, which I presume was the 

 female, occasionally settled on the nest for a short time, while the 

 male was engaged in bullying me ; as I told him at the time, it was 

 nothing else ; I had not attempted to molest him and the nest 

 was certainly quite half a mile away." 



Colonel Butler records the following note regarding the nidi- 

 fication of this Tern in the Persian G-ulf : " On the 3rd April, 

 1878, at my request and through the kindness of Mr. Huskisson, 

 Telegraph Department, a boat was sent to the island of "Warba in 

 the Kore Abdullah, at the head of the Persian Gulf, and a fine 

 series of the eggs of this bird obtained. 



" There were two species of Terns breeding on the island at the 

 time, viz. Sterna anc/lica and the present species, the former in 

 one part of the island and the latter in another. 



" In both cases the nests were very abundant and built in colonies 

 with a space of about one foot between them. The nests consisted 

 of small mounds of sand scraped up about 4 or 5 inches high, with 

 small sticks and twigs on the top for the eggs to rest upon, and most 

 of them contained three eggs more or less incubated. Skins of both 

 species (S. anglica and 8. caspia} were forwarded to me with the 

 eggs for identification, and as there were no other birds at all on 

 the island at that time except a few Herons (A. cinerea), which 

 were also breeding, I think there can be no doubt of their identity." 



The eggs of this species are, as a rule, comparatively broad ovals, 

 and but few of them show any sort of tendency to being pointed 

 at the small end ; here and there in a large series rather more 

 elongated examples occur. 



The shell is compact and firm, but by no means fine-grained, 

 and is entirely devoid of gloss. 



The ground-colour of the great majority of the eggs is greyish 

 white, with the faintest possible creamy, buffy, or pinky tinge ; 

 but in a few eggs it is decidedly brown or buff stone-colour. As 

 usual in the Terns, the markings are of two characters, first the 

 primary ones, of varying shades of brown from almost black to a 

 sort of olivaceous sepia, and the secondary ones, which seem to lie 

 beneath the surface of the shell, and are pale lilac or pale greyish 

 purple. Rarely are the markings at all thickly set in the eggs of 

 this species; indeed, the characteristic of this latter is small markings 

 for the size of the egg and these thinly set. It is difficult in words 

 to convey a correct idea of these differences, but I think that the 

 eggs of this species are distinguishable at a glance from those of 

 any other that we get in India, though some of them undoubtedly 

 run very close to some of those of L. hemprichi, which, however, 

 are considerably smaller as a body, and much more distinctly and 

 universally buffy in their tinge. The eggs vary from 2*3 to 2-75 

 in length and from 1-71 to 1-89 in breadth. 



