NOTES AND QUKKIES. 



387 



the northern counties. On the mud-banks were also several Common 

 Sandpipers and one Ringed Plover, but the former'.birds also migrate south 

 very early, and often appear in Oxfordshire about that time; the latter, 1 was 

 informed, bred in the vicinity. A Roller, which was shot in the island in the 

 summer of 1886, was shown to me as an unknown bird ; and I also examined 

 a Rose-coloured Pastor killed some twenty-five years ago. I was glad to hear 

 that the Peregrine still bred regularly on one of the cliffs on the east side of 

 the island ; the nest had, I believe, been robbed this year, and I saw nothing 

 of the birds, the only species noticed about the cliffs being some breeding 

 Herring Gulls and Shags, and a Kestrel. The Herring Gulls on the wing 

 (above e ghty) were all adult, with one exception— i^is;. a very brown young 

 one following the old birds, which could not fly well. A little way further 

 along the coast I saw two immature Great Black-backed Gulls on the wing, 

 but these of course were not bred there.— Oliver V. Aplin (Bloxham, near 

 Banbury). 



Disparity in Size and Colour of Eggs of the same Species —In 

 support of the Editor's suggestion (p. 349), I can cite an instance in which 

 an abnormally small egg was certainly not the last laid. Some years ago 

 I found a Hedgesparrow's nest which as yet contained only two eggs, one of 

 them not larger than a Wren's, the other— as well as the rest laid after- 

 wards — being of the normal size. There is little doubt that in this instance 

 the small egg was the first of the clutch. On May 10th last I took four 

 Chaffinch's eggs exactly like Bullfinch's eggs of the ordinary type— light 

 blue with a circle of purplish spots on the large end. But that I saw the 

 nest and the parent birds, I would not have had the slightest suspicion that 

 the eggs were not those of a Bullfinch.- Allan Ellison (Shillelagh, 

 Co. Wickiow). 



Lesser and Black Terns near Gloucester.— On September 12th a 

 specimen of the Lesser Tern, Sterna minuta, was shot on the Gloucester 

 and Berkeley Canal, about four miles from Gloucester, the first recorded 

 in this county, although I believe the species has been seen or shot before. 

 Another Black Tern was also shot on the Severn, near Gloucester during the 

 last week in August.— H. W. Marsden (37, Midland Road, Gloucester). 



White-winged Tern in Cornwall and Scilly.— Allusion has been 

 made to the difficulty of distinguishing between the young of the Black 

 Tern, Sterna fissipes, and the White-winged Tern, S. leucoptera. Among 

 several of the former, at Mr. W. H. Vingoe's at Penzance, I saw one which 

 presented characters which led me to think it could not be of that species, 

 and I am glad to say that on being submitted to Mr. Howard Saunders 

 he decided it to be a White-winged Tern. It was shot at Sennen, in 

 Cornwall. When Mr. Harting edited the late Mr. Rodd's work on the 

 ' Birds of Cornwall,' the White-winged Tern had not been identified as a 



