At the Water’s Edge 
Gulls are well called in the books ‘long- 
winged swimmers;’’ at times floating or 
gracefully paddling upon the water, but much 
oftener seen in the air, slowly coursing upon their 
very long and pliant wings. Most of the spe- 
cies are quite large, and they are chiefly coast 
birds, although a very few of them extend also 
far into the interior of the continent. There 
are in ail, in North America, twenty species, a 
dozen of them found on the Atlantic coast, 
and the remainder on the Pacific.- They are 
for the most part arctic birds; that is to say, 
they commonly breed very far to the north; 
so far, indeed, that several of them are called 
circumpolar. At the approach of cold weather 
most of the species wander southward along the 
coast; some not even so far south as to the 
United States; others to New England and 
the Middle Atlantic States, and a very few to 
Florida. Possibly their coming south in winter 
is not so much due to their being ‘‘frozen out ’’ 
from arctic regions, as to the fact that food is 
more abundant in warmer waters. Our herring 
gull breeds between New England and Lab- 
rador, while another and much smaller species, 
commonly found along our coast, even in sum- 
mer, and called the ‘laughing gull,’’ from 
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