316 



AUTUMN AND WINTER 



(2) By the Sea 



Few birds have more difficulty in getting food than the 

 gulls. They seem to have no proper home. The black- 

 headed gulls, the species chiefly frequenting London, cannot 

 get a living at sea, which is their proper home ; and they 

 do not seem particularly well fitted for life on land. They 

 flock to the ploughs as soon as harvest is over, tumbling 

 over one another in their greed, and often fluttering and 

 'scrabbling' within a yard or two of the ploughman's back. 



'the gulls press and scramble close behind the plough' 



They come yearly in greater numbers to the river-side towns, 

 and though one regards them by the sea as the wildest of 

 birds, expressing wildness in the strange cry that seems 

 taken from the tempest, they are grown so tame that they 

 will feed from the hand and can be captured — experlo crede — 

 by the hand. One may say that the whole tribe of gulls are 

 in a manner parasite. The skua gull, of course, largely lives 

 by stealing, by robbing other birds of the fish they have 

 caught, just as in America the eagle will rob the fish hawk. 

 The greater black-backed gull is a murderer. In the realm 

 of nature it is seldom if ever that a more brutal sight is 

 vouchsafed than this gull attacking a laggard or a wounded 

 duck. There is savagery in the impetus of the onset. The 

 beak is driven as if it were a sword into the screaming bird, 



