XVII. 



LARUS FUSCUS. (lixx., temm.) 



Lesser black-backed Gull. 



Montagu says, that on the island of Romsey, on the nes- 

 tern coast of England, where the Lesser black-backed and 

 Herring Gulls breed together, the former bears a very small 

 proportion (about one in twenty) to the latter ; upon the 

 Fame islands, however, on our Northumberland coast, it is 

 just the reverse, there being a very few pairs of the Herring 

 Gull amongst the Lesser black-backed, which breed there in 

 great numbers. They appear to prefer those islands which are 

 the most rocky, and upon which there is the least herbage, 

 and, though they have their choice, very few of them deposit 

 their eggs upon the grass, and yet they rarely lay them with- 

 out making a tolerably thick nest for their reception ; it is of 

 grass, loosely bvmdled together in large pieces, and placed in 

 some slight depression or hollow of the rock. Amongst up- 

 wards of a hundred that I examined, one or two only had 

 small pieces of sea-weed mixed with the other materials. — 

 They lay two or three eggs, varying in every possible shade 

 of colour, from the dark olive of Fig. 1, to the light tint of 

 Fig. 2, the spots are also not less various, one in my collec- 

 tion having a beautiful girdle of markings at the larger end 

 only. No class of birds is so unerring, or so regular in the 

 time of their breeding, as those which inhabit the ocean ; 

 whilst most of our inland birds have been, for two months or 

 more, irregularly engaged, either in building their nests, in 

 incubation, or have already reared their young ones, they 

 have deferred it to a much later period, and, as if urged by 

 one impulse, the numerous species which inhabit these islands 

 resort to them as it were by magic, and all is noise and bustle. 

 This has occurred for years upon the Fame islands, withm 



