PRELIMINARY CLASSIFIED NOTES 69 



week in May, while laying is general about the middle of the month. Where the 

 first clutches have been taken, fresh eggs may of course be obtained later, but only 

 a single brood is reared during the season, and by about the middle of July the 

 breeding-places are entirely deserted. [F. c. R. J.] 



5. Food. Chiefly small fish. Also " small shell-fish." The stomach of one 

 bird was found full of the " comminuted remains of a bivalve shell " (Macpherson, 

 Fauna of Lakeland, p. 411). The young are fed on small fish, young whiting being 

 quoted as the principal diet in one colony, Ravenglass (H. W. Robinson and 

 F. W. Smalley, British Birds, iii. 169). [F. B. K.] 



LITTLE-TERN [Sterna minuta Linnaeus. Little-kip, skerrek. French, 

 petite hirondelle de mer ; German, Zwerg-Seeschwalbe ; Italian, fraticello]. 



1. Description. Apart from its small size the lesser-tern can at once be 

 distinguished by the broad white forehead and broad black stripe from the beak to 

 the eye. The sexes are alike, and there is a slight seasonal change of plumage. 

 (PI. 98.) Length 9-5 in. [241-30 mm.]. There is a broad band of white on the 

 forehead, but the rest of the crown arid nape are black. The upper parts are of a 

 pearl-grey colour, save the rump and upper tail-coverts and tail feathers, which are 

 white, and the primary major coverts, which, like the first three primaries, are blackish 

 along the outer web and the inner side of the shaft ; the remainder of the primaries 

 are pearl-grey, with white margins to the innermost. The outer secondaries have 

 the outer webs dusky grey, the rest white ; the inner are pearl-grey, like the back. 

 The sides of the head and under parts are of a silky white. Beak gamboge-yellow, 

 tipped with black, legs and feet orange-yellow. After the autumn moult the white 

 on the forehead broadens somewhat, and the outer primaries are darker towards the 

 tip. In the juvenile plumage the feathers of the upper parts have dusky horse-shoe, 

 or arrow-headed, subterminal bars, and are tinged with sandy buff, but the rump, 

 tail-coverts, and tail feathers have a wash of pearl-grey. The wing-coverts are 

 variegated like the back, save the marginal coverts, which are dusky, forming a dark 

 band across the wing. The primaries are of a dark slate edged with white, and 

 conspicuously different from those of the adult. The forehead is of a dull white, and 

 the crown and nape dusky black. The young in down is of a light sandy buff or 

 sandy grey, the nape spotted with black, and with three fairly distinct longitudinal 

 stripes of black along the back. Under parts white, [w. p. P.] 



2. Distribution. Unlike the Arctic, roseate, and common terns, the little- 



