OCR Text |
Show SOME REMARKS ON GULLS does he do it? How does he poise himself on an invisible ledge of air, " Motionless as a cloud That heareth not the loud winds when they call, And moveth altogether if it move at all 1 " How does he sail after a ship, with wings outspread, against the wind, never seeming to move a feather? You understand how a kite mounts upon the breeze: the string holds it from going back, so it must go up. But where is the string that holds the gull ? I like these city gulls because they come to us in winter, when the gypsy part of our nature is most in need of comforting reminders that the world is not yet entirely dead or civilized. A man that I know once wrote a poem about them, and sent it to a magazine. It was evidently an out-of-door poem and so the editor put it in the midsummer number,when you might cross the ferry a hundred times without seeing a single gull. They do not begin to come to town until October ; and it is well on into November before their social season begins. In March and April they begin to flit again, and by May !US SOME REMARKS ON GULLS they are all away northward, to the inland lakes among the mountains, or to the rocky islands of the Maine coast. Let us follow them. n A GULL PARADISE IN the waters south of Cape Cod, where blue-fish and other gamy surface swimmers are found, the gulls are often useful guides to the fisherman. When he sees a great flock of them fluttering over the water, he suspects that the objects of his pursuit are there, feeding from below on the squid, the shiners, or the skip-jack, on which the gulls are feeding from above. So the fisherman sails as fast as possible in that direction, wishing to drag his trolls through the school of fish while they are still hungry. But in the colder waters around the island of Mount Desert, where the blue-fish have never come and the mackerel have gone away, the sign of the fluttering gulls does not indicate fish to be caught, but fish which have already been caught, and which some other fisherman is cleaning for the market as he hurries 249 |