320 



AMERICAN ORNITHOLOGY. 



mad career. The first nook that they came across was their hiding 

 place; if large onough to conceal them, well and good, if not, it had to 

 answer even though only their head was out of sight. Vexatious as it 

 was not to get the pictures we wanted, we laughed at the antics of the 

 young birds until the tears rolled down our cheeks, and as I heerd the 

 excited cachinatiens of the parent birds I thought of the old saying, 

 "Laugh and the World laughs with you, etc." but whether they were 

 laughing or not, I am not prepared to say, but if they had the slightest 

 sense of the ridiculous, they must have been laughing to see us try to 

 head off and photograph their unruly children. Since returning home, 

 I have often thought that perhaps we pursued the wrong course in try- 

 ing to calm them; instead of soft and soothing tones to keep them 

 quiet, if we had imitated the shouts, cries and cackles of their parents 

 perhaps they would have minded us. 



Many of the Gulls ivere on the ground white others curvecl grace- 

 fully through the air, all noisily cackling. 



Although estimating the number of birds in a place can not always 

 be satisfactory, we judged as best we could from the flying birds, the 

 nests and the noise, that there must be about five hundred pairs of 

 adult birds in this colony snd perhaps a hundred pairs in a smaller 



