16 BRITISH SEABIRDS: 
little, however, what the season may be, for many 
interesting birds are sure to be met with by the 
sea; the wide waters and wet tide-swept shores are 
a perennial feeding place, and a safe and congenial 
refuge. 
Of all the birds that haunt the sea and the shore, 
those of the Gull family are the best known. 
From whichever direction the sea is reached, 
almost invariably the first indication of its vicinity 
is a Gull, sailing along, it may be, in easy, careless 
flight, or wheeling and gliding high in air above 
the waste of restless waters. The Gull and its 
kindred then are inseparably associated in the 
minds of most people with the sea, and with them, 
therefore, it certainly seems most appropriate to 
commence our study of marine bird-life. 
The Gull family is divided by many systematists 
into three fairly well-defined groups or sub-families, 
viz., the typical Gulls or Larine, the Skuas or 
Stercorariine, and the Terns or Sternine. The 
Skuas, however, are included with the typical Gulls 
by many naturalists, a proceeding for which much 
may be said, thus reducing the three sub-families 
to two. In their distribution the Gulls and Terns 
may almost be regarded as cosmopolitan, but the 
Skuas are chiefly boreal in their dispersal, four 
of the half dozen known species breeding in the 
Arctic Regions, and two others dwelling in the 
higher latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere. Some 
of the species are very widely distributed; the 
