the other species of sea-fowl, even to sucking their eggs
whenever their owners left them uncovered. This species is
found over the seas and coasts of the North of Europe and
North America, but from the breeding-stations in Scotland
and Norway, which they quit in August, some of the young
birds of the year rove southward, down the western and
eastern lines of the coast of England, as before mentioned in
reference to other species of the genus. Richardson s Skua
has been killed in Lancashire, and on the eastern coast of
Ireland, both in the bays of Belfast and Dublin. This
Skua was seen by Sir Wm. Jardine upon the Durness Firth
in Sutherlandshire, in June, 1834. Several examples have
been killed on the coast of Durham late in August and early
in September, and most of them young birds of the year;
others have been obtained in the county of Norfolk. Some
years since I saw a young bird that had just been shot on the
Thames at Battersea; and in the autumn of 1842, four
young birds of the year were shot on the reservoir at Kingsbury,
a few miles north of London ; two of these specimens
were more uniformly dark brown than the other two, from
having lost many more of the light brown margins of the first
set of feathers. These birds appear also on the coasts of
Kent, Sussex, Hampshire, and Devonshire. Both the adult
and the young have been taken in Cornwall. M. de Selys
Longchamps, in his Fauna of Belgium, says, Lestris Richard-
sonii occurs occasionally on the Dutch and Belgian shores.
The young bird during its first autumn and winter has the
base of the beak and the cere brownish-grey; the anterior
portion conspicuously curved and black; the irides dark
brown; the head and neck pale brown, streaked with dark
brown; the back, wing-coverts, and tertials umber-brown,
margined with wood brown; wing-primaries brownish-black,
tipped with pale brown ; tail-feathers pale brown at the base,
then brownish-black to the end ; the central pair half an inch
longer than the others; neck in front, breast, belly, and
under tail-coverts pale yellowish wood-brown, mottled and
transversely barred with umber-brown ; legs, and the base
of the toes yellow, the ends of the toes and the anterior portion
of the intervening membranes black, and hence called
sometimes the Black-toed Gull; but this is only an indication
of youth: as the bird increases in age the yellow colour is lost
by degrees.
The next stage, which in this species, also, as in the Poma-
rine Skua, probably occurs in the second year, the plumage
is of a uniform greyish umber-brown, the whole of the light
brown margins having disappeared, and the bird has now
acquired its full size, measuring from the point of the beak to
the end of the long feathers of the tail twenty inches, the
central pair of tail-feathers being three inches longer than the
next feather on each side ; the wing, from the anterior bend
to the end of the longest quill-feather, thirteen inches and
three-quarters ; the tarsus one inch and three-quarters ; the
middle toe and claw together the same length, or one inch
and three-quarters.
After this stage a few yellow hair-like streaks appear on
the sides of the neck; next, the sides of the neck become
lighter in colour; and, advancing in age, the neck all round
becomes white, tinged with yellow, the head remaining of
the same colour as the back. Males and females are not distinguishable
by their plumage, and as this species, like the
smaller Gulls, is capable of breeding when one year old, it
is observed, that birds, sometimes in similar states, and sometimes
in very different states as to plumage, are in pairs at
the breeding-stations.