FARNE ISLANDS AND THEIR BIRDS 175 



forty yards of wire to the electric shutter, and took 

 Miese down to the rocks, and waited there myself 

 until a good number of birds were sitting, when 

 I connected the wires, and so released the shutter. 

 This should have ensured a good photograph ; but 

 luck was again against me. For some reason the 

 camera had moved, and the birds, about twenty in 

 all, were found to be blurred when the plate was 

 developed. I think one or more of the terns must 

 have settled on the heap of seaweed which covered 

 the apparatus, and so moved the camera at the 

 critical moment of exposure. With the sandwich 

 terns I was a little more fortunate, but even in this 

 case only one bird was found to show on the plate. 

 In my hiding-place I could not see the birds, and so 

 had to rely on a signal from a keeper, who was lying 

 on a rock some eighty yards away. He must have 

 been watching the wrong group, for when he signalled 

 there were thirty or more sitting on the particular 

 spot which he was looking at. While I was in hiding 

 a ringed plover came and fed near, not two yards off, 

 and I had a long and delightful view of this bird. 

 We found a ringed plover's nest, with two eggs, in 

 the midst of a group of sandwich terns' nests 

 indeed, the ringed plover seemed fairly common ; 

 this evidently was the second brood of this pair 

 of birds. 



Every step we take seems to rouse hundreds of 



