Nest, &c. . 
510 NATATORES. LARUS. GULL. 
PENNANT seems to have been the first of our authors who 
noticed this species as British ; for the bird he has described, 
as seen on the coast of Anglesea, and which he felt uncertain 
whether to rank as a distinct species, or only as a variety of 
Larus marinus, possesses the essential characteristic of the 
bright yellow legs, which distinguish it from its larger con- 
gener, as well as from the Herring Gull. Its characters 
were afterwards more fully detailed and established by Mon- 
racu (in his Ornithological Dictionary and the Supplement), 
under the English title it now bears, though the Latin sy- 
nonyms attached to it, and to his Herring Gull, are mis- 
quoted, and ought in fact to be reversed. ‘This error he was 
led into by Pennant and Latuam, both of whom have con- 
founded the Herring Gull with the Larus fuscus of Lix- 
wus; though the specific characters of “ dorso fusco, pedi- 
bus flavis,” manifestly pointed out the bird to which the ap- 
pellation belonged. The present is a common species on 
many parts of our coast, abounding where the Herring Gull 
is only met with occasionally, or in small numbers. Thus 
upon the Northumbrian shore, and in several districts of 
Scotland, it is the prevalent kind, and may be found at all 
seasons of the year. It breeds abundantly on the Fern 
Islands, colonizing two of the largest and flattest, and never 
(as far as my observation goes), tenanting the tops or ledges 
of the precipitous rocks.—The nests are composed of a quan- 
tity of dried grass, and the three or four eggs are of a deep 
oil-green, blotched irregularly with brownish-black. The 
young, upon exclusion, are covered with a parti-coloured down 
of grey and brown, but this is rapidly hidden by the growth 
of the regular feathers, and in a month or five weeks they 
are able to take wing. ‘These breeding places, or galleries, 
are sometimes at a considerable distance from the sea, a large 
one being in a morass on the moors, near the boundary be- 
tween Northumberland and Cumberland. They are met 
with also on some of the islands in the fresh-water lakes of 
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