BIRDS OF THE RAVENGLASS GULLERY. 167 
marram-grass. Often there is no nest at all apart from the 
shallow depression in the sand; at times a slight nest has been 
sketched, so to speak, with dead bents of marram, and inter- 
mediate stages may be seen when perhaps half a dozen bents 
have been used. Where there are two eggs they point some- 
times in the same, sometimes in opposite, directions. The eggs 
may be a well-matched pair or widely different in colour. Their 
colour range altogether is very great. The majority have a 
white or cream ground-colour marked with large black and brown 
spots and blotches. One egg had a dark brown ground heavily 
marked with darker brown and black ; another had a pure white 
ground marked with fine black spots no larger than those on a 
Coot’s egg. All the nests had excrement in their immediate 
vicinity ; the splashy liquid feces were almost invariably at one 
side, and at a distance of a few inches from the nest, and 
suggested that the birds when brooding always face in one 
direction, and that they void their feces whilst standing in the 
nest. An interval, apparently of three or four days, takes place 
between the deposition of the eggs, for whenever I found two 
young birds they exhibited a marked difference in size, and I 
often saw an egg in a nest, and at a distance of a few inches from 
it a young bird a day or two old at least. 
The young, as is the case with many species of Gulls and 
Terns, leave the nest soon after they are hatched and crouch 
near it. Hven when very young—before the companion egg is 
hatched—a young bird is sometimes lying a couple of feet from 
the nest. At this tender age the bird makes a slight and barely 
noticeable depression in the sand, in which it crouches. Ata 
latter stage of growth a narrow bed is excavated, wherein the 
young bird crouches with its back below the level of the sand. 
On June 21st I found two young birds not quite able to fly, but 
with the frosty grey primaries well developed. They were 
crouching some five or six yards apart, each in a little bed like 
a Rabbit-scratching, into which its body exactly fitted, its back 
being below the level of the surrounding sand. Ata distance of 
a few yards it was almost impossible to distinguish them from 
their surroundings. I subsequently found other young ones of 
this age similarly crouched. Young Black-headed Gulls which I 
used to surprise as they were walking about sedately in the 
