256 LONG-WINGED SWIMMERS 



ful and pleasing. It is a white-and-gray bird, excepting the 

 black bonnet wliich covers the upper half of its head and neck, 

 and its bill, feet and legs are coral red. 



Along our Atlantic coast, and especially from Nantucket 

 to Hattei'as, it was once a very familiar bird, and its escape 

 for annihilation has been of the narrowest. The anti-bird- 

 millinery laws passed by New York and other states effectu- 

 ally stopped the sale of wild birds and their plumage for 

 "millinery purposes," and the Terns are no longer slaughtered 

 as heretofore. In several places where they breed they are now 

 protected, and henceforth should slowly increase in number. 



There are now but few localities on our Atlantic coast 

 between New Jersey and Nova Scotia where the Common 

 Tern, or "Sea Swallow," breeds. Two of these are Muskeget 

 Island, northwest of Nantucket, and Gardiner's Island. 

 The once numerous colony that formerly inhabited Gull 

 Island, near the eastern end of Long Island, was broken up 

 and driven off by a "military necessity," no less important 

 than the building of a modern fort to protect the City of New 

 York. By a strange coincidence, it was the 12-inch guns of 

 our coast defence artillery that drove these much-persecuted 

 birds from one of their favorite nesting-grounds, 



THE SKIMMER FAMILY 



Rynchopidae 



The Black Skimmer^ is a tern in form, but without the 

 spear-like bill of the latter for spearing fish. Its lower man- 

 dible is formed for use as a cut-water — long, thin, rather broad, 



' Ryn'chops ni'gra. Length, about 16 inches. 



