THE BLACK- HEADED GULL. 
325 
year than ever. One of my companions, who had been here 
a few years before, did not then see more than one third 
of the birds which we observed. In consequence of their 
being protected, we can judge with certainty of the natural 
period of production of the young birds, and several other points 
which cannot be determined in localities where the eggs are, time 
after time in the same season, carried away. Thanks to Earl 
O’Neill, the beautiful Lams ridibundms and Sterna hirundo had 
at least one asylum of peace and safety in the north of Ireland, 
where they could, without dread or fear of annoyance from man, 
increase and multiply their species. 
When at Hands Island on the 5th of August, 1 846, I was in- 
formed that owing to the breeding-ground being inundated, not 
a black-headed gull bred there that year. In the preceding year 
they were abundant; probably not less so than in 1833. On the 
4th of June, 1850, this island was visited by a party of ornitho- 
logists, who did not see more than two pair of these gulls near it, 
and were told that hardly any had bred there during the last few 
years. The decrease was attributed by the boatmen partly to the 
frequent robbery of the eggs, and partly to the present custom of 
spreading the fishermen's nets over the ground where the nests 
were formerly placed. One nest, containing two eggs, was found 
on the island.* 
In the last-named month, a fisherman at Toome stated that 
great numbers of these gulls bred on Scabby Island, Lough 
Beg, four or five years ago, but that none do so now.f 
A former breeding-haunt of these gulls, on an island’ at Lough 
Achery, county Down, is mentioned in the second volume of this 
work (p. 146), in connexion with the heron, which they drove 
from the locality, that they might appropriate it to themselves. 
One shot at Lough Clay (south), in the same county, in the sum- 
mer of 1845, where a pair only bred that year, came under my 
notice, as have single specimens obtained in the breeding-season 
at islands of Lough Egish and Lough-a-vane, county Mona- 
ghan. About a thousand birds, old and young together, were 
f Ibid. 
* Mr. J. R. Garrett. 
