LITTLE TERN 239 
at Rockcliffe, Ravenglass, Walney, and Formby. There 
are colonies in Anglesea. It breeds sparingly in Orkney, 
and possibly in Shetland and the Outer Hebrides. 
STERNA MINUTA, Linn. LITTLE TERN. 
This species seems to have been unnoticed in Man until 
1898, when I found a colony on waste land immediately 
adjoining the beach. There were perhaps twenty pairs, 
nesting on a tract of bare yellow sand, with little vegeta- 
tion, but plentifully strewn with small loose stones. Later 
in the year they seemed to have removed to the inner part 
of the beach itself, and in 1899 and 1900 I found a number 
of nests in this second locality. Here the breeding ground 
was on the inside of a large bank of shingle and sand cast 
up by the sea, while on its landward side was a sand bar 
covered with sea-reed, which divided it from the waste on 
which I had first located the breeding station. Much of 
the ground was covered with luxuriant tufts of a broad- 
leaved silvery coloured orache (Atriplex laciniata) and with 
fruiting plants of Sea-purslane (Honckenya peploides), but 
the nest hollows were in bare sand. I have since found 
their eggs on both the former and latter grounds, and in 
1903 some nests were further out toward high water mark. 
Sometimes eggs are laid without any preparation whatever, 
even a shaped cavity being dispensed with; but I have seen 
also a rather neat paving of small gravel. 
The Little Tern commences to lay about the beginning of 
June ; a clutch of two eggs is somewhat more frequent than 
one of three. Compared with those of the Arctic Tern, the 
