A HISTORY OF CORNWALL and a few guillemots all noisily living in company. Terns, as a rule, form separate colonies on the smaller inner rocks. The greater part of the flat turf- covered island of Annett is literally riddled with the burrows of puffins and Manx shearwaters that nest here in thousands. Ringed plovers, oyster-catchers, and rock-pipits breed in great numbers all round the inhabited and on several of the uninhabited islands including Annett, Samson, St. Helens and Great Ganilly. The conditions of bird life in Scilly differ greatly from those on the mainland. From the point of view of migration these islands are second in importance only to Heligoland, but the subject is too complex to treat in limited space. The extent to which the migratory movements over the archipelago differ from those that affect the bird population of the mainland is to some degree indicated by the fact that no fewer than fourteen species have occurred as accidental visitors at Scilly that have not been recorded for the rest of the county at all. These fourteen species are : Yellow-browed warbler Lesser kestrel Water pipit American bittern Lesser grey shrike Little ringed plover Woodchat Killdeer plover Ortolan bunting Red-breasted snipe Short-toed lark Esquimaux curlew Iceland falcon Whiskered tern Nearly all these waifs and strays have occurred in autumn, and indeed most of the rarities at Scilly occur at that season, so that the autumn migratory movements are presumably much more complex than those of the spring. The total number of species in the county ornis is 303, exclusive of sundry introductions and escapes from captivity. The number for Devonshire as indicated in D'Urban and Mathew's Birds of Devon (ed. 2) is 290, and the inclusion of the melodious warbler and Continental Coal Pit brings the total up to 292. The following table shows the status of the birds in the two counties : Residents . Summer migrants Winter visitors . Birds of passage . Casual visitors Accidental visitors Miscellaneous 303 292 The miscellaneous birds include in each county the pheasant, an in- troduced resident ; and for Cornwall the turnstone, which occurs in the county all the year round and may have bred at Scilly ; the gannet, which is cer- tainly resident but does not appear to have ever bred in the county; the turtle- dove, a regular summer visitor for which only one single nest has been recorded, and the roseate tern, which formerly bred at Scilly, but has been extinct in the county for more than thirty years. Apart from the pheasant the introduced and semi-naturalized birds that have been shot in the county include : Canadian goose (3) American summer duck (i) Egyptian goose (2) Red-legged partridge (i) Spur-winged goose (i) Barbary partri d g e (2) 328 Cornwall Devon 83 85 27 31 38 38 is '7 70 66 65 54 5 i
