298 NOTES—ORIGINAL AND SELECTED.
rich in shore fowl and wild fowl as it was in decoys. Now, there are only two
decoys working in Essex. Gulleries (several), colonies of terns, and ringed
plovers, and in the marshes redshanks, oyster-catchers, and snipe, and
in the sandhills the harmless and beautiful shell-duck, were once as
common in Essex as they are now in the preserved 'dunes' and 'polders' in
Holland opposite, where I have seen them swarming on thousands of acres as
thickly as of old. Parts of Essex were indeed so full once of breeding wild fowl
and shore birds, that they might have taken a local name from them as did the
island of 'Eyre-land' by the Texel opposite.1 The young shore fowl used to be
fatted. Fuller says that there was an island of 200 acres near Harwich called
'Pewit Island' (pewits were black-headed gulls), of which they 'were in effect
the sole inhabitants. On St. George's Day precisely they pitch on the island,
seldom laying more than six or fewer than four eggs. Great is their love to their
young ones, for though against foul weather they make to the mainland (a sure
prognostication of tempests), yet they always weather it out on the island when
hatching their young ones, seldom sleeping when sitting on their eggs (afraid, it
seems, of spring tides), which signifieth nothing as to securing their eggs from
inundation, but is an argument of their great affection.' Fuller is always good
reading when he deals with what he calls the 'natural commodities' of a county,
and he adds to this sympathetic and quite correct description of the gulls that the
young ones when taken to be eaten consist only of bones, feathers, and lean
flesh 'which hath a raw gust of the sea,' but that they are fattened by the
poulterers on curds and gravel, which are meant both as food and physic, and that
their flesh thus 'recruited' is most delicious.
" The era of young sea gull pie will probably not return, but the Essex Bird
Society's report says that owing to an inundation which has made Pewit Island a
swamp, this ancient gullery seems likely to be re-established. In spite of the
great inundations of 1898, which broke the Essex sea-walls, and the high tides
which flooded the salt marshes, the following reports show that birds have
increased there in the short time since the foreshore was protected. Bearing in
mind that total destruction overtook many breeding-grounds which looked most
promising (I have myself seen three miles of shore dotted with eggs all along
high-water mark on the edge of a protected salt marsh in Norfolk), the report is
very promising.
" The concrete results are that the ringed plover have increased generally.
The terns have been saved from extermination, and will soon, it is hoped, recover
their numbers as fast as they have at Wells. Until lately they were raided every
year by professional egg-robbers, who took the eggs and stuffed the poor little
terns, shooting the old ones later on when the 'season' opened to stuff with
them.
" Mr. George Hope, of Havering Grange, informs me that at Havergate
Island he heard that arctic, common, and lesser terns all did better than usual
this year, and that he saw more himself, and that he has seen a black tern (a
species which once bred in England, but now does not).
" Outside the sea-walls are half dry saltings along scores of miles of the Essex
shore. The birds seem to have learnt that they are now safe there, and nest in
numbers where they did not before. It was there, unfortunately, that last year's
high tides overtook them. Gulls are increasing fast, mainly the small black-
1 Caesar notes that in his time the savages on the islands near the mouths of the Rhine
lived on fish and birds' eggs.