Birds' -Nesting Season. 59 



Maltese cross, in a saucerful of little scraps of sand- 

 stone and speckled granite, carefully chosen to match 

 their colouring. 



But for the knowledge that almost all birds, if their 

 nests are disturbed at all early in the season, lay 

 again,* the prick of conscience, without which an egg 

 which the bird has been at so much pains to conceal 

 cannot be taken, would be too dear a price to pay, 

 even for the pleasure and interest of a collection, with 

 the refreshing recollections it can awake of " thick 

 groves and tangled streams " hunted in boyish days, 

 and island-dotted lakes, moors and marshes, and sea- 

 beaten headlands, since visited in intervals of sterner 

 occupations. 



Most Sea-gulls, certainly the herring and lesser 

 black-backs, whose eggs are largely collected for 

 food wherever they are at all common and easily 

 got at, have very considerable powers of egg-pro- 

 duction at will, though the ordinary " clutch " when 

 undisturbed is seldom more than three or at most four. 

 The only difficulty seems to be with the colouring 

 material, which is apt to run short, and the more eggs 

 are taken, the paler, as a rule, becomes the ground 

 colour and the less clear the markings. 



It is a fairly safe assumption that an egg unusually 

 strongly marked or highly coloured is one of the first 

 of the season which the bird has laid, and it is not an 

 uncommon thing, at least with Gulls, to see the pitch 

 of colour in a nest containing one or more of such 

 smart eggs brought down to the average by an un- 

 usually pale egg or two in the same nest. 



The Scoutie ailen, as the Richardson's Skua is called 



*A remarkable instance of the perseverance with which a 

 bird will at times cling to the spot selected for a nest is re- 

 corded in Appendix B. 



F 2 



