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Show *8/l.] LETTER FROM MR.W. H. HUDSON. 5 eggs are taken every year, the Gulls do not seem to diminish in numbers. The abundance of their food in the settled districts favours them greatly in their « struggle for existence.' " The young birds are of a pale grey colour mottled with dull brown, and have a whining querulous note. The plumage becomes gradually lighter through the autumn, winter, and spring ; but it must be a year at least before they are perfectly like the adults in the fine ash-blue of the wings, and in the white bosom with its lovely perceptible blush. It is now ten months since the young were fledged, and yet, in a flock, an observer at a hundred yards distance can easily distinguish them from the old birds. " So soon as the young birds are able to fly, the breeding-place is forsaken, the whole concourse leaving in a body, or scattering in all directions over the surrounding country ; and until the following summer, the movements of the birds depend altogether on food and water. As I mentioned in m y last letter, in seasons of drought they disappear totally, and when Grashoppers are very abundant appear in countless multitudes. Drought and Grasshoppers unfortunately often come together, so that the Gulls are not so useful as they would otherwise be. In dry summers, when the insects are abundant, it is common to hear people wish for rain, that the Gulls might come and devour the Locusts. Apparently Gulls have been useful to man in the same way on the western plains of North America*. " The Gulls congregate in great numbers about ploughed grounds, filling the new-made furrow till it appears like a white line, hovering in a cloud over the ploughman's head, and following at his heels, fighting, screaming, buffeting, in a compact crowd. When feeding they invariably keep up a great noise and screaming. Wilson's expression in describing a northern species, that its cry 'is like the excessive laugh of a negro,' is also descriptive of the language of our bird. Its peculiar cry is lengthened and inflected a thousand ways, and interspersed with numerous short notes like excited exclamations. When their hunger is satisfied they fly to the nearest water, where they drink and bathe their feathers. Their ablutions over (in which they appear to take great delight), they retire to some open spot in the neighbourhood abounding in short green grass. Here they sit close together with their bills to the wind; in still weather they also all look one way; and the observer will watch the flock in vain to find one individual out of this beautiful order. It is remarkable that they do not stand up to take flight, but rise on the air directly from a sitting posture. Usually they flap their wings twice or thrice before the body is raised from the ground. " In some seasons in August and September, after a period of rainy * "This I infer from a passage in Dixon's 'New America.' Speaking of the hardships the Mormons endured when first settling on Salt Lake, he tells us that the locusts eat down the grain as fast as it grew, but that this evil was finally overcome by their devices to trap the insects, and ' with the help of Gulls from the lake.'" |