THE BIRDS OF HELIGOLAND 551 



to disturb the birds until the day of the festival of St. James, July 

 25th. This protection of the birds must have ceased subsequently ; 

 for when I came to the island, fifty years ago, no breeding gulls 

 were any longer to be found, and any one who liked could shoot 

 the Guillemots which bred on the island. Moreover, the formid- 

 able diminution which the area of the dune and the height of 

 the sandhills have undergone in the interval, combined with the 

 encroachment of visitors consequent upon the establishment of the 

 Sea-Baths, must alone have sufficed to render futile any further 

 attempts at nesting on the part of the birds. 



In the neighbouring island of Sylt the birds have been almost 

 completely exterminated, in consequence of the institution, by the 

 German Reichstag, of the Wild Birds' Protection Act. They used to 

 breed there in thousands until the year 1873 ; besides them, large 

 numbers of Eider Ducks had their nesting stations on the island. 

 On the occasion of my visit to this breeding station in 1874 I 

 indeed still found several hundreds of nests ; all of them, however, 

 with the exception of three, had been plundered of their eggs. The 

 Herring Gulls on that island make their homes on the sandhills, 

 the wide and extensive slopes of which are densely grown over with 

 short heather and grass, and are used as pastures for large flocks 

 of sheep. The proprietors, from time immemorial, have had the 

 right to collect the gulls' eggs, which were brought to market, and 

 yielded a by no means inconsiderable revenue. Only the first 

 clutch used to be taken, and the birds were protected during their 

 further breeding operations by allowing the shepherds to have the 

 small eggs of the Terns, in return for which compensation they 

 were to keep off all trespassers. The Protection Act referred 

 to above, however, prohibited the owners of these lands from col- 

 lecting the gulls' eggs, and they accordingly no longer had any 

 interest in looking after the protection of their birds ; the conse- 

 quence was that the islanders used to rob all nests they could lay 

 hands on during the night and at early dawn. As I have already 

 said, I only found three nests left which contained eggs, while 

 thousands of gulls were filling the air with plaintive cries ; on 

 every dung-heap, however, in front of the smaller houses, lay 

 wheelbarrow loads of the shells of gulls' eggs, it being evidently 

 considered superfluous even to make an attempt at concealing 

 them. 



The nesting stations of this Gull extend from eastern Scan- 

 dinavia westwards to the central parts of North America. In the 

 south they stretch along the coasts of the North Sea and of France 

 and Spain down to the Azores and Canary Islands. 



