A TERN COLONY 135 



Revisiting the scene this month, after a long 

 lapse of time, he found the community a mere 

 shadow of its former self, about a hundred nests 

 being found on an extent of surface where five 

 times as many could have been easily counted two 

 decades ago. 



Despite this, however, " the Point " remains 

 an excellent place for studying the nesting customs 

 of what is certainly the most graceful of the 

 British sea-birds. An arid promontory, with the 

 waves ceaselessly singing or sighing on two sides 

 of it, it nevertheless presents a diversity of sur- 

 face which would be interesting if only because its 

 geological history is so easily read. Patently, it 

 is composed of a series of pebble beaches, whose 

 varying ages are marked not only by their position 

 inside one another, but by the degrees in which 

 a scanty vegetation has been able to effect a 

 lodgment upon them. The outermost beach is 

 composed of wave-rounded pebbles, the shining 

 whiteness of whose piled-up mass is broken only 

 by the line of dried seaweed and other marine 

 jetsam flung there at the highest reach of winter 

 tempests. On the second beach, well marked oft 

 from the first by a depression, but following the 

 same line within, patches of stonecrop have taken 

 root, and redeem it from utter barrenness. A 

 third beach, just traceable inside the others, is 

 partly hid with stonecrop, bent, and patches of 

 depauperized bell-heather ; and into the heart of 

 the angle fringed by all three, the neighbouring 

 moor has thrust a long finger of its own substance, 

 and the family of heath plants imperfectly cover 



