48 BRITISH BIRDS. [vol.xv. 



ornithological friends on June 8th, 1907 (see the Naturalist, 1907, 

 pp. 270-3). Although the Common Tern was more numerous there 

 than the Arctic Tern, the latter was by no means uncommon. They 

 were nesting in two or three separate colonies apart from the Common 

 Terns. The largest nesting colony of Arctic Terns was on the shingle 

 of the beach, two or three hundred yards away from the nearest nest 

 of a Common Tern. This colony contained thirty or more nests with 

 eggs, and I carefully examined all the birds belonging to it with my 

 field-glasses from behind a washed-up spar some fifty or sixty yards 

 away. They were all Arctic Terns. The following year my friends 

 again visited Wainey and they reported that the proportion of each 

 species was just about the same as in 1907. 



Respecting the colony in South Lancashire, it has been there 

 for some years. In 191 2 I spent a week in the Scilly Isles with several 

 friends and these South Lancashire nesting Terns had then been known 

 to two of them for at least three or four years. Rather to my surprise 

 they informed me that " the bulk of them " were Arctic Terns. If 

 this is the same site (and I have not the slightest doubt in my own 

 mind), it would appear that there the Arctic Tern is decreasing, or, 

 more probably, that the Common Tern is increasing ; as my friends 

 described it as a straggling and incompact colony in 1912. 



H. B. Booth. 

 Ben Rhydding, Yorks. 



