510 NATATORES. LARUS. GULL. 



PENNANT seems to have been the first of our authors who 

 noticed this species as British ; for the bird he has described, 

 as seen on the coast of Anglesea, and which he felt uncertain 

 whether to rank as a distinct species, or only as a variety of 

 Larus marinus, possesses the essential characteristic of the 

 bright yellow legs, which distinguish it from its larger con- 

 gener, as well as from the Herring Gull. Its characters 

 were afterwards more fully detailed and established by MON- 

 TAGU (in his Ornithological Dictionary and the Supplement), 

 under the English title it now bears, though the Latin sy- 

 nonyms attached to it, and to his Herring Gull, are mis- 

 quoted, and ought in fact to be reversed. This error he was 

 led into by PENNANT and LATHAM, both of whom have con- 

 founded the Herring Gull with the Larus fuscus of LIN- 

 N^US ; though the specific characters of " dorso fusco, pedi- 

 bus flavis," manifestly pointed out the bird to which the ap- 

 pellation belonged. The present is a common species on 

 many parts of our coast, abounding where the Herring Gull 

 is only met with occasionally, or in small numbers. Thus 

 upon the Northumbrian shore, and in several districts of 

 Scotland, it is the prevalent kind, and may be found at all 

 seasons of the year. It breeds abundantly on the Fern 

 Islands, colonizing two of the largest and flattest, and never 

 (as far as my observation goes), tenanting the tops or ledges 

 Nest, &c. of the precipitous rocks. The nests are composed of a quan- 

 tity of dried grass, and the three or four eggs are of a deep 

 oil-green, blotched irregularly with brownish-black. The 

 young, upon exclusion, are covered with a parti -coloured down 

 of grey and brown, but this is rapidly hidden by the growth 

 of the regular feathers, and in a month or five weeks they 

 are able to take wing. These breeding places, or galleries, 

 are sometimes at a considerable distance from the sea, a large 

 one being in a morass on the moors, near the boundary be- 

 tween Northumberland and Cumberland. They are met 

 with also on some of the islands in the fresh-water lakes of 



