496 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1914. 
gulls at about 8 p.m. The sky was clouded, and there was barely 
enough light to follow the movements of the birds from a position 
about 15 feet away. The birds, which were thoroughly hungry, 
moved about somewhat uncertainly but they fed promptly from the 
two dishes in which their food was placed. When these birds were 
still partly in the nestling down plumage, on the evening ot July 8, 
1911, I made some notes on their movements at night. There 
was some light from the moon which was at half phase. I found 
the birds swimming or standing at the edge of the water in their 
inclosure, and they seemed to move easily in the semidarkness. 
During even the darker portion of the night that I spent on 
Middle Strawberry Island, I had plenty of auditory evidence that | 
both adult and young gulls were more or less active when it was 
too dark for me to see any thing of the birds. The moon set about 1 
a. m., and there was no light except that furnished by the stars. 
Adult birds were evidently flying occasionally, and juvenals were 
occasionally heard peeping. 
On many occasions, food was brought to my captive gulls in paper 
wrappers. Often the package was placed on the ground more or 
less completely open. When the paper was flapped by wind, the 
gulls showed a good deal of apprehension. At one time they would 
not approach the package, although they could see that food was 
inside. They became more accustomed to the flapping paper but 
did not entirely lose their fear of it. This experiment was attempted 
only occasionally. 
Even when there was no flapping paper, great distrust was shown 
for the package, when the contents were covered by it though not 
entirely hidden. Under such circumstances, food was removed 
with slow and timid approaches followed by quick retreats. Flap- 
ping pieces of paper were for over a year very disturbing to the cap- 
tive gulls, but after they had been fed daily for some weeks with food 
placed on a sheet of paper, their fear of moving paper decreased 
greatly. 
3. Reactions to chemical stimuli.—During considerable portions 
of the time that I had the captive gulls, I conducted experiments 
on their reactions to chemical stimuli. <A preliminary statement * 
concerning the results of this worl has already been published, and I 
plan to publish another fuller account later. In general, IJ may 
say here that I found my captive gulls showing what I interpret 
as a dislike for pieces of liver that had been dipped in solutions of 
table salt or in weak acids. The following notes are extracted from 
my records of the first experiment. On July 11, 1911, I placed a 
number of pieces of herring in a strong solution of table salt in a 
1 Strong, R. M., 1912, The sense of taste in birds: Science, n. s., vol. 35, No. 911, June 14, p. 940. 
