204 NATURAL HISTORY. 



It associates in. flocks of from twenty to fifty or more, and skims up and down the river with a peculiar 

 flight, keeping close to the water, and now and then dipping its bill into the stream. It is asserted 

 that it picks up small fish and Crustacea, and it is quits possible that it does so occasionally, but I have 

 examined several, and never found any remains of those animals in their stomachs. I have generally 

 discovered merely a little oily fluid, and I confess that I am ignorant of what it actually lives on. Some 

 travellers have asserted that the African species feed on the ground, searching the soft mud with their 

 beaks, but I have never seen the Indian birds so engaged, and doubt their doing so. At one time 

 I was inclined to think that these birds perhaps fed at night, and had such a rapid digestion that no 

 remains of their food were to be seen during the day, but on one occasion I shot several, in company 

 with Mr. W. T. Blanford, on the Irawaddy, rather early one morning, and we found nothing but the 

 usual oily fluid, and that in very small quantity. The Skimmer breeds in April and May on sandy 

 churrs, laying four, occasionally five, eggs of a pale stone-yellow colour with blotches of grey and brown, 

 quite Tern-like. The young when hatched are stated by Burgess to be clad in a whity-brown down, 

 with dark spots. Mr. Brooks writes me that he found the young Skimmers hatched by the 15th of 

 April, at Mirzapore, and that ' it was amusing to see an army of some hundreds of these little fellows 

 (tortoiseshell-looking things) running steadily a couple of hundred yards before us. They run well, 

 and when we reached the end of the sand-bank they attempted to swim off, while many squatted down. 

 They did not make much way swimming, and sank very deep in the water.' " 



THE SECOND SUB-FAMILY OF THE LARID.E. THE TERNS, OR SEA-SWALLOWS (Stomitue). 



These elegant birds have the plumage of miniature Gulls in a great degree, but are of a much 

 more slender build, with very long and pointed wings and tail, and very short legs. Their flight is 

 extremely graceful, and nothing can be more interesting than to watch a flock of Sea-Swallows engaged 

 in hunting for their prey. Flitting along with a fairy-like flight, they may be seen dancing over the 

 water, every now and then dipping down on the surface with a gentle splash after something which 

 their sharp eyes have detected. They are not, as a rule, met with far from land, and sometimes large 

 flocks may be seen beating about off" the coast, and hunting in company. After severe weather they 

 may be found on inland lakes or rivers, and several instances of the Black Tern (Sterna fissijies) 

 occurring on the Thames at least sixty miles from the sea, have come under the writer's notice. 



Several species occur on the coast of Great Britain, and Mr. Seebohm's journal of his trip to 

 the Fern Islands off the Northumberland coast contains many very valuable notes on the Sea- 

 Swallows : " By far the most interesting and beautiful birds inhabiting these islands are the Terns, 

 of which there are three, and perhaps four, well-marked species breeding in the locality. The most 

 important of these is the Sandwich Tern. On the short grass between the masses of bladder campion 

 that grew in the wide Opens almost to the spring high-water tide-mark I found three and four eggs 

 of this bird. On one side of the wide Opens is a very much smaller island, almost bare of vegetation, 

 and connected with the larger island by a long shingly beach, which is entirely covered at high water. 

 It being about low water I trudged patiently and laboriously over the loose stones until I reached the 

 small island, which I found to be a perfect little El Dorado. On a gently sloping sandbank leading up 

 to the nucleus of the island, or the island proper, which was merely a mass of shelving rocks perhaps 

 thirty feet across, there was a colony of Sandwich Terns' nests. These nests, if such they could be 

 called, were slight hollows in the base sand, about the size and depression, say, of a cheese-plate. The 

 nests and their contents were so difficult to distinguish from the sandbank that my first discovery of 

 the colony was to find that I had ' put my foot in it,' and broken a Tern's egg. In the thick of them 

 there must have been an average of a nest for nearly every square yard. On this little island in less 

 than a quarter of an hour I found an Eider Duck's nest with eggs, several Lesser Black-backed Gulls' 

 nests with eggs, besides taking four Ringed Plover's eggs, seven Oyster-catcher's eggs, about a dozen 

 eggs of the Common and Arctic Terns, and more than a hundred eggs of the Sandwich Tern, and I 

 suppose I might have taken at least a hundred eggs of the latter bird if I had been so disposed. All 

 the eggs of the Sandwich Tern which I brought away were in splendid condition, most of them 

 apparently being just fresh laid. Some of the nests, or hollows in the sand, for they could scarcely be 

 called nests, contained two eggs ; a very few had three, but by far the largest number contained only 



