‘THE HERRING CULL. 540 
more extensive on the inner web until the seventh quill is reached, in which the 
black is nearly obsolete; the second to sixth quills tipped with white!; remaining 
plumage entirely white; bill bright chrome with a vermilion spot near angle, and 
sometimes black traces; feet and legs pale flesh-color. Adult in winter: Similar 
but head and neck streaked with brownish gray; bill duller. Jmmature: Brown- 
ish gray, nearly uniform, or finely mottled with grayish white below; streaked 
with the same on head and neck; upper parts irregularly varied,—brownish gray 
of two shades with dull white and grayish buff; wing-quills and tail brownish 
dusky, the former unmarked, the latter mottled laterally with dull buffy or whitish; 
bill blackish, paling basally. Between this and the adult in high plumage every 
intergradation appears. Length 22.00-26.00 (558.8-660.4) ; av. of nine O. S. U. 
specimens: wing 17.60 (447.); tail 6.72 (170.7); bill 2.14 (54.4); tarsus 2.68 
(68.1). 
Recognition Marks.—Brant size; mantle rather light bluish gray; black 
wing-tips (with white spots on adult) distinctive for bird of this size. 
Nest, on the ground, or (under the influence of persecution) in trees, of 
grasses, moss, and seaweed. Eggs, 2 or 3, yellowish and olive-brown to dull 
bluish white, spotted, blotched, and sometimes scrawled, with chocolate-brown 
and umber. Av. size, 2.85 x 2.00 (72.4 x 50.8). 
General Range.—The northern portion of the northern hemisphere; in North 
America breeding from Maine, northern New York, the Great Lakes, and Min- 
-nesota, northward; south in winter to Cuba and Lower California. 
Range in Ohio.—Common in spring and fall on Lake Erie, where some 
regularly winter and a few possibly breed; not uncommon migrant along water- 
courses and about the reservoirs in the interior. 
OHIO does not furnish these graceful intermediaries of water and sky 
a permanent home, but they are easily the commonest birds of their group 
in spring and autumn. ‘Their breeding ground lies further north, in the 
Georgian Bay and beyond, and only a few score of the immature birds in 
the gray plumage, “ower young to marry yet,’ lounge about upon our Lake 
Erie Islands during the summer. Similarly the majority of individuals pass 
further south during the actual freeze-up of mid-winter, proceeding appar- 
ently to the seacoast of the Carolinas, but a few hardy individuals, old birds 
this time, linger about the rifts in the Lake Erie ice, or follow the ice-cutters 
at their task, while a few more winter on the Ohio River. The southern 
birds, however, are among the first to put a favorable construction on the 
early promises of spring. I saw one passing up the Scioto River on the 
13th day of February last year—and by the middle of March they are again 
common on the Lake. 
The Herring Gull is both a fisherman and a scavenger. In the former 
capacity he takes up his station on a post in one of those picturesque lines 
of piling which support the fish traps, stretching in endless profusion along 
the south shore of Lake Erie. Here the Gull helps himself freely to the 
small fry, which are driven to the top by the struggles of their big brothers 
in the toils. When the season is dull or the nets are empty, the bird wings 
1 The American birds were for many years described as a subspecies, L. a. smithsonianus Coues, on 
the ground of more extensive subterminal black of primaries and larger size; but the characters alleged 
were found to be inconstant, and the name abandoned (Cf. Auk, July, 1902.). 
