THE TERNS AND THE HIGH TIDE.
THE cyclone which caused such destruction in the environs of Paris at the end of last week brought absolute ruin to the " suburbs " of one of the most interesting bird cities in this country. For some years the last nesting place on the Norfolk coast of the great and lesser terns, in Lord Leicester's sand-hills near Wells, has been carefully protected during the breeding season. The result has been a great increase in their numbers. The "Wells Society for the Preservation of Wild Birds" employs watchers from daylight till dark to guard the
nests from human robbers and to destroy the rats and crows which steal the eggs when possible. As not only the terns, but all other shore birds near are protected, the latter have also increased, and both redshanks, ringed plover, and peewits have nested in great numbers, not only on the sand-hills, but on the "meal-marshes" which lie between these and the sound land. In the storms at the end of last week four successive tides flooded these thousands of acres of meal-marsh, drowning all the young birds, and leaving the eggs in hundreds along the high-water mark on the sand-hills. Though the rooks and gulls had been busy feeding on them for a week the writer counted nine eggs of the tern, seven of the ringed dotterel, a peewit's egg, with three dead nestling terns, within a distance of forty yards. The nests on the sand-hills escaped the flood, but many young birds lie dead, killed by the cold rain. The western limit of their nesting ground is a hollow in the sand-hills, covered with scattered tufts of marram-grass. On either side, towards the sea, and inland by the meal-marsh, are scattered ridges of shingle, the foundations on which the sand-hills have grown up where the wind-borne atoms from the "great barrier sand" which the ebb-tide uncovers have gathered and grown. High above the hills the large terns were hovering and calling, and scattered among the marram • stalks were found the nests and the newly batched young. The nests were not alike. Some were neatly made of dead grass. Others were hollows scraped in the sand. Others, by some curious freak of the birds, were lined entirely with tiny fragments of broken shells of cockles, razor-fish, and mussels. The ringed plover, or "stone runners" as they are locally called, arrange these fragments, apparently for ornament, outside their nests. The terns seem to have imitated them without having sufficiently cultivated the msthetic faculty. They use the shells not as ornaments, but as furniture. There is other evidence that the terns are less progressive birds than the plover tribe. When mature they are so tame that they are the easiest victims of the "sportsmen" who shoot along the beach of seaside villages in August, and when newly hatched they show little of the instinct of self-preserva- tion so marked among the plover tribe. The baby terns, just hatched on the sand-bills, had crawled from their nests, even while half-hatched eggs remained. But they lay quite visible on the naked sand instead of making for some form of cover, like young peewits or ringed plover. The down with which they are covered is of the same tint as the ground colour of the peewit's egg. They are spotted with black, and these spots are round, like the black eye of the nestling, which would aid in concealing them in a suitable environment. But their legs are too short to enable them to run, and the little birds lie humbly on the sand, with their necks stretched out and heads upon the ground. Then, seeing something moving close to them, this " defective " instinct deserts them. They open their beaks and cry for food. Many of the nests were made on the sand thrown out from rabbits' burrows, the most exposed site that could be chosen. Very few are formed on the shingle, where the three eggs which each contains would be almost invisible. The nests of the redshanks and of the ringed plovers are often made within a few yards of those of the large terns, and are far more difficult to find. Of four clutches of eggs, two of terns, the others of the red- shank and ringed plover, all of which lay in an area of a few yards, the former were seen at once. The redshank's were concealed in a marram tuft, and the stone-plover's, lying in shingle of the same size and general colour as the eggs, were almost invisible. The ringed plovers are also adepts at decoying the visitor from their nests. There is a simplicity in the little plovers' practice of the art which should endear them to every lover of birds. We were examining the point of a long tongue of shingle, where their nests were very numerous. All the parent birds, some seven or eight pairs, had run off the shingle on to a piece of rough ground, inter- sected by gullies cut by the high tides. There, one after another, they imitated the movements of a disabled bird, giving the performance in almost too great detail, for they appeared almost to creep upon their breasts, flutter- ing both wings, and spreading their tails, until, as we humoured them, they reached a considerable distance from the nests, and then rose and flew off whistling. This shingle spit is the nesting ground of the very few pairs of lesser tents left upon the marsh. The birds are scarcely larger than a swift, and utter a sharp, screaming call, unlike that of the greater tern. "Chit pens" is the local name for these sea-swallows, and a "chit perl's " nest is now rare even at Wells. The eggs are rather large, in pro- portion to the size of the bird, and were all laid in the shingle. One nest was only a few yards distant from that of a pipit, which had reared its brood at a distance of exactly 6 ft. from high-water mark, in what is perhaps the most northern patch of vegetation on the Norfolk shore. In the high tide which flooded the " meal-marshes " several low mounds of shingle had remained as islands in the surrounding flood. This was particularly noticeable in a large bight inclosing many acres of sand-heaps and shingle " binks." The high-water mark was traced round all these elevations, a mass of vegetable debris, bones of rabbits, of shore-fowl, including some which appeared to belong respectively to the skeletons of the heron and the goose, and numbers of eggs and bodies of baby terns. Close by this wreckage, and to the drowned bodies and nests, were the eggs and living young which had escaped the sur- rounding flood. On four of these little mountains of refuge, none much larger than the floor of a drawing-room, were nests both of "chit perls " and ringed plover.
On one of the smallest mounds, the area of whose unsub- merged summit as traced by the flood-mark had not been larger than a billiard-table, a single infant tern was left as the sole survivor. It was scrambling about among the shingle and calling for food, though judging from its appearance it had only been hatched that morning. Two other eggs in the nest had been addled, probably by the cold, for the young in them were matured though dead. The scene from this inner bight between the meal-marsh and the sand- hills was such as can only be matched on other parts of this North Norfolk shore. Seawards, through a breach in the sand-hills, through which the sea had carried the thousands of tons of shingle, on which the terns were, on to the inner marsh, lay the "great barrier sand," on which a flock of curlew were sitting Inside the sand-hills, sitting in the sun, at a distance of a hundred yards, were five or six black and white ducks, obviously sheldrakes, several pairs of which are nesting in rabbit burrows on the sand-hills. There also were a few land birds, linnets, water-wagtails, pipits, and larks, all of which nest upon the "hills." Above the line of hillocks some two hundred terns were soaring, while stone-plovers were flying and whistling in every direction on the pebble banks. Towards the land and for nine miles eastward lay the "meal-marsh," one vast sheet of grey crab-grass, pastured by flocks of newly shorn sheep. Some years ago the rising tide flooded the meal- marshes so rapidly that many hundreds of sheep were drowned, the flock following their leader into one of the deep creeks when the herbage of the marsh was submerged and the line between shallow and deep water obliterated. In the wetter portions of the meal-marsh were acres of dark- green leaves, among which the noisy redshanks were calling incessantly. These are the summer leaves of the plant called "sea-lavender." Later the flower rises to a considerable height, and covers the ground with a mist of pale-mauve, feathery blossom. The mandrake is also reported to grow upon the meal-marshes, but we could not discover the leaves. While searching among the thrift and crab-grass we flushed a cock partridge, which instead of flying across the creeks and tideway towards the land, made directly seawards, and pitched among the terns' nests on the outer line of sand-hills. This bird was one of four or five pairs which have abandoned the land and cultivated fields, and live by choice on the strip of sand-hills, separated by two miles of salt-marsh, often entirely covered by water, from their proper home on the mainland. What their food consists of it is difficult to con- jecture, for there is scarcely one genuine "land plant" either on the sand-hills or the meal-marsh, and neither the seeds nor the grain which form a large part of their usual food are available. But Perdrix maritimus continues to thrive among the marram and sea-plants even though he has no- visible means of subsistence.
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