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REPORT ON THE BREEDING OF THE LESSER TERNS 

 AT THE SPURN DURING THE SEASON OF 1900. 



OX LEY GRABHAM, M.A., M.B.O.U., 

 Thornton-le-dale, Pickering; Chairman and Convener of the Y.N.T7. Wilti Birds Acts 

 Protection Committee. 



For the last few years our only remaining Yorkshire colony 

 of these beautiful little birds has suffered shamefully at the 

 hands of egg collectors, who, if they had been permitted, would 

 have soon decimated the remnant that remained. No objection 

 would have been made to an odd clutch being- taken for a 

 collection, but when thirty and forty eggs were taken away by 

 a single individual, it was felt that the time had come to step in 

 and interfere, if the birds were not to be entirely driven away 

 from the place. Unfortunately, as at present administered, the 

 Wild Birds Protection Act is nothing less, in many cases, than 

 a dead letter, and were it not that private enterprise frequently 

 steps in, it would be reduced to a mere farce. When the true 

 history of the gradual extermination of many of our rare and 

 interesting birds comes to be written, a very heavy indictment 

 will have to be laid at the door of the egg robber ; no doubt 

 the gradual drainage of the bird's favourite haunts, and the 

 increase and spread of an ever-growing population, are very 

 important factors in the case, but the trail of the egg collector 

 is over them all. Birds which are rare in one particular place 

 are generally pretty common in some other locality, and it has 

 always been a mystery to me why such ridiculously high prices 

 should be offered by collectors for certain British-taken eggs 

 when these are common enough on the continent. I am an egg 

 collector in a small way myself, but I can safely say that in my 

 cabinet most of the rarer kinds are represented by continental 

 specimens. Though I have found the nests of nearly all of them 

 in the British Isles, as it gives me far greater pleasure to 

 watch the habits of the birds themselves when incubating their 

 egg's and rearing their young, than it does to take away their 

 nests and eggs. Of course there are egg collectors and egg 

 collectors, but the worst type is he who poses as a naturalist 

 with his right hand, and with his left employs men, honest 

 enough fellows as a rule, but glad in these hard times to earn an 

 additional penny, to collect for him every clutch they can come 

 across of some particular species of bird's eggs. Such a one 

 can only be compared to his ornithological prototype, that arch 



1900 October 1 . 



