many hard searches for them; and they are very difficult to find, unless the bird is actually seen to run from the nest, or rather from the eggs, for, as a rule, nest there is none, the eggs being only placed on the sand, with which they get half buried, when they may easily be mistaken for a small bit of speckled granite and passed by.  In the summer of 1866, a friend and myself had a long search for the eggs of a pair we saw and were certain had eggs, as they practised all the usual devices to decoy us from them, till my friend, actually thinking one of the birds to be badly wounded, set his dog at it; after this all chance was over:  this was in a small sandy bay, called Port Soif, near the Grand Rocques Barracks.  I mention this as I am certain these birds had eggs or young somewhere close to us, and this was the farthest point towards Vazon Bay from the Vale I found them breeding.  The sandy shores of Grand Havre and L’Ancresse Bay seemed to be their head breeding-quarters in Guernsey.  Though I only found one set of eggs in Grand Havre, I am sure there were three or four pairs of birds breeding there; the two eggs I found were lying with their thick ends just touching each other and half buried in sand; there was no nest whatever, not even the sand hollowed out; they were in quite a bare place, just, and only just, above the high-water line of seaweed.  I should not have found these if it had not been for the tracks of the birds immediately round them.  In L’Ancresse Bay I was not equally fortunate, but there were quite as many pairs of birds breeding there.  In Herm the shell-beach seems to be their head breeding-quarters, and there Mr. Howard Saunders, Colonel l’Estrange and myself found several sets of eggs, generally three in number, but in one or two instances four:  these were probably hard-sat; in one instance, with four eggs, the eggs were nearly upright in the sand, the small end being buried, and the thick end just showing above the sand.  In no instance in which I saw the eggs was there the slightest attempt at a nest; but Colonel l’Estrange told me that in one instance, in which he had found some eggs a day or two before I got to Guernsey, quite the end of May, he found there was a slight attempt at a nest, a few bents of the rough herbage which grew in the sand just above high-water mark having been collected and the nest lined with them.  I have not found any eggs in Alderney, but I have no doubt they breed in some of the sandy bays to the north of the Island occasionally, if not always, as I have seen them there in the breeding-season, both in 1876 and in 1866.  This summer (1878) I was so short a time in that Island that I had not time to search the most likely places, but Captain Hubbach wrote me—­“I do not think the Kentish Plover remained here to breed this year, although I saw some about in April.”

Professor Ansted includes the Kentish Plover in his list, but only marks it as occurring in Guernsey.  There is one specimen, a male, in the Museum.