BIRDS OF DUMFRIESSHIRE 
427 
meriting on this record in a letter to Mr. J. A. Harvie-Brown, 
says : " Kirkmichael is an inland parish fifteen or sixteen 
miles from the sea ; the birds are only likely to have been 
stragglers, but there is a loch there." What species was 
meant by the " Greater Tern " one cannot tell ; and the 
" Lesser " seems in early days to have been very little known, 
at least locally. Mr. John McDiarmid, an ornithologist of 
high standing in his day, states that on October 30th, 1826, 
a bird "never before seen in this country was shot in 
Kirkblain meadow [Caerlaverock]. It is the lesser Tern or 
Sea Swallow, Sterna minuta of Linnaeus. The bird is about 
eight inches long and nineteen inches broad from tip to tip 
of the expanded wings. It answers to Bewick's description 
and figure exactly with this exception, that the feathers of 
the tail are not white as he describes, but of a pale lead 
colour, Hke that of the beak [!] and wings."* The use of the 
word " country " in the above quotation probably means 
" in this locality," and can hardly be expected to indicate 
Scotland ; though John Fleming, in his History of British 
Animals, published in 1828, states that this species " in- 
habits England along with the common Tern,"t and omits, 
expressly or otherwise, any mention of Scotland. H. A. 
Macpherson remarks that Dr. Heysham [b. November 22nd, 
1753 ; d. March 23rd, 1834] " catalogues the Lesser Tern 
as breeding in Cumberland, though without a hint as to any 
locahty. T. C. Heysham [his son] informed a friend in 1829, 
that the Lesser Tern was a scarce visitant to the Solway 
Firth ; "J but Sir WiUiam Jardine, writing in 1843, mentions 
a colony upon the Solway at Skinburness,§ Cumberland. 
Mr. R. Service teUs me that he can remember Little Terns 
being brought to him as rarities by local gunners so recently 
as 1875. 
It is believed that this species in the first half of the 
* Dumfries Courier, November 21st, 1826. 
t Hist. Brit. Animals, 1828, p. 144. 
% Fauna of Lakeland, 1892, p. 419. 
§ Nat. Lib., 1843, Vol. XIV., p. 283. 
