BIRDS 429 



Foulshaw had again become reduced to a very few pairs. The 

 colony at St. Bees numbered a few hundred pairs, and no doubt 

 supplies our coast with its resident population. It nests in May, 

 and I observed many young squatting upon the rocks in June 

 1891, frequently accompanied by the old birds. All those that 

 I have examined flying about the breeding ledges have proved 

 to be fully mature, with the single exception of one immature 

 but nearly full-dressed bird, detected among the number of these 

 loudly clamouring birds disturbed from their nests on one of 

 my inspections in 1885. Many immature birds undoubtedly 

 feed in the fields at a short distance from the breeding station, 

 and form an important component part of the Grey Gulls which 

 habitually frequent this portion of our coast-line. Upon the 

 sands of Morecambe Bay this species is less numerous than some 

 other Laridse, and the same applies to the upper Solway, where 

 the Herring Gull is comparatively scarce in full dress, though 

 you may occasionally see some fine old birds resting on broken 

 turfs at the edge of Burgh marsh. Although the Lesser Black- 

 backed Gull nests so commonly on the mosses near our coast, I 

 have never seen the Herring Gull in the breeding season on any 

 of our moors or flows, with the single exception of Foulshaw 

 moss. 



LESSEE BLACK-BACKED GULL. 



Larusfuscus, L. 



The Lesser Black-backed Gull is at all seasons a common 

 bird upon our coast-line, but of its five large breeding colonies 

 no fewer than four are situated in the neighbourhood of im- 

 portant estuaries. When Thompson visited Windermere in 

 July 1835 he observed a pair of adult birds on the lake. Mr. 

 Durnford was told many years later that this species had nested 

 on islands in this lake ; but if this species ever nested in such 

 a situation, it has not clone so since 1870; a remark which 

 applies also to Ulleswater, where Mr. H. Saunders states that a 

 colony once existed upon an island. That single pairs may 

 occasionally nest in such localities as those just mentioned (as a 

 single pair does upon a rocky slope beside the Eden) is far 



