88 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



close to and even just overlapping the chief settlement of the 

 Black-headed Gulls. As usual with this species, they occupied 

 a small area, where nests, or rather clutches of eggs, were 

 closely crowded. But in 1909 we did not find them, and I was 

 told that, like other Terns, they frequently shift the locality of 

 their breeding-ground. 



A still more interesting species was the Gull-billed Tern, 

 large numbers of which, together with Avocets, occupied a 

 remote part of the open grass-land, the nests of the two species 

 being mixed all over the surface. At this time the nests of the 

 Tern had usually three eggs, those of the Avocet four. The 

 curious laughing cry of the large Gull-billed Tern, whose tail is 

 but slightly forked, is very characteristic, and so are its eggs, 

 which approximate somewhat in appearance to those of a Gull, 

 being more elongated in shape and more uniform in form and 

 colour than those of the Common and Arctic Tern. Mr. Chap- 

 man does not seem to have met with either this species or the 

 Sandwich Tern here in 1893, though he saw the latter and another 

 large Tern, which he failed to identify, on the outer sand-dunes. 

 Dr. Bambusch remarks that while the Sandwich Tern, in accord- 

 ance with its habits elsewhere, seeks its food on the North Sea 

 coast behind the Klit, 8. anglica goes eastward and inland, 

 following the plough on the cultivated lands, like a Gull. The 

 nests of both Gull-billed Terns and Avocets were of a very 

 artless character, but other nests of the Avocet, on an artificial 

 strip* projecting into the Fjord, were much more substantial 

 structures. These curious and beautiful birds, so strangely 

 attenuated in form, with their pure black and white plumage, 

 shrill cry, and singular method of using their singularly-shaped 

 bills, were abundant on Tipperne, guarding their nests on the 

 grass, or wading with their long blue legs in the sunlit water of 

 the channels. 



On the great shallow of Stavning Grund, about half a mile 

 from the middle of the eastern shore of the Fjord, the isolated 

 Klaegbanken, about two miles long by a few hundred yards in 

 width, lies parallel with the mainland, from which, when the 



* Such narrow dykes are constructed of sods for the purpose of reclaim- 

 ing the space between them, as has been done on Tipperne to a considerable 

 extent. 



