196 A VISIT TO AN ESSEX GULLERY.
our heads while we remained at them. The eggs are decidedly
variable, the ground-colour ranging from greenish-olive to dark
russet-brown. We brought away several of the more curiously-
marked specimens.
Close at hand was another large pool, known as Pennyhole Fleet,
among the reeds on the edge of which, the keepers told us, about sixty
pairs of gulls had built their nests earlier in the year, but that the
birds had suddenly and unaccountably deserted them before laying
any eggs.
There can be no doubt that there were once many more nesting-
colonies of the black-headed gull on the Essex coast than there are
now. The names Great Cob Island and Little Cob Island in
Tollesbury Fleet, and Cobmarsh Island at the entrance to Mersea
Quarters, are evidences of the ancient tenure of the gulls in this
locality. There is also a Cobb's Farm on the Goldhanger coast.
Mr. C. Parsons, writing from Southchurch in 1833 says ("Field
Naturalist's Magazine," i., 533):—"The black-headed gull is a
constant resident with us, but not until last summer have I ever
been able to discover a nest in my immediate neighbourhood,
although on a small island about twelve miles further on the coast
they regularly breed in abundance. I was much pleased last spring
on finding a few eggs on a piece of salterns a short distance from
where I reside, and on visiting the spot about a week after I found
that a large company of them had taken up their abode there." He
adds that some fishermen took many of the eggs, and although the
birds were indefatigable in laying, not an egg was allowed to hatch.
A much older allusion to an Essex Gullery is that of Fuller. In
his "Worthies of England," published in 1662, he speaks of the
island, still known as Pewit Island, but formerly as Fowley Island1;
it is for the most part in the parish of Great Oakley (not Little
Oakley as Morant says), between Walton-on-the-Naze and Harwich.
The black-headed gull is still sometimes called the pewit gull.2
Morant (i., 490), in alluding to Fuller's statements, cautiously
remarks that the island takes its name from the "great quantities of
pewits which come and breed in it in the spring, but whether all the
wonderful circumstances related by Dr. T. Fuller are exactly true is
1 The passage from Fuller's "Worthies" here referred to is set out in Mr. Harting's paper on
Decoys, ante page 159.—Ed.
2 In Dale's "History of Harwich" (page 402), it is called "The Pewit or Blackcap." There
is another Pewit Island between Mersey Creek and Parrock, and a third near Bradwell waterside
on the Blackwater, from which basketsful of gulls' eggs used to be obtained within the memory of
persons now living.