$206 Tur ZooLocist—SEPTEMBER, 1872. 
them both by day and night, and generally about the same places,— 
even the same sand-banks and shoals. On the 21st, guillemots and 
razorbills, with the young of the year, were tolerably plentiful out 
at sea, between the Humber and Cromer; also, but far less nume- 
rously, between this and the Dutch coast. 
Arctic and Common Terns.—On the 9th, I found five pairs of 
terns near some “ fitties,’ which extend beyond the sea-embank- 
ment in the parish of North Cotes, above Tetney Haven. This is 
a wild, dreary district, and one very well adapted for the nesting of 
our shore-birds. Landward we look across a thinly populated 
district, almost perfectly level, some part arable, but principally 
under grass, and dotted with sheep and cattle; the fields are 
divided by drains. Here and there, but at long distances, is a 
shepherd’s cottage, or lone farmstead, with a few trees surrounding 
it; further inland, more trees and hedgerows, with the tower of a 
village church rising above them; beyond this, but at the distance 
of many miles, the long, low line of the “wolds.” Seaward, there 
are the “ fitties,” thickly overgrown with Cakile maritima, Arenaria 
marina, Plantago maritima, Statice limonium, Armeria maritima, 
Atriplex laciniata, and other salt-loving plants ; “ marram”-covered 
sand-hillocks lie between the “ fitties” and shore, and then, like 
a great sandy desert, for it is low water, the dreary coast of 
Lincolnshire stretches away to the dim horizon, without a break of 
any kind to relieve its monotony, except a beacon, and the black 
ribs of a schooner, which came on shore some autumns since in the 
great October gale :— 
“A coast 
Of ever-shifting sand, and far away 
The phantom circle of a moaning sea.” 
But the sea to-day is scarcely visible, for it is so calm, and hot, 
and still, that no breaking foam marks the line where land ends 
and water commences; but in the extreme distance, against the 
pale sky-line, there is ever a chequer-work of black and white 
rising and falling, where the waves are breaking, and tumbling, and 
making dirge-like music, above one of those many sand-banks 
which fringe this coast from the Humber to the Wash. In a 
north-east gale it is a terrible lee-shore for the sailor: he has a sea 
to contend with that is pitiless, cruel, and exacting; many a good 
ship has struck and gone to pieces out of sight of land, and all 
hands been lost, without a chance of rescue. But to return to the 
