morsel and snatch it with open mouth. The pomarine is confined in 
summer to the most northern coasts, but the other two abound all 
over the tundras and nearer Aleutian Islands, laying two, dark-green, 
profusely spotted eggs on the bare ground. In summer they fly far 
inland, catching field-mice and lemmings, robbing the nests of ducks 
and other birds, searching the beaches and river-banks for dead fish, 
and even eating berries. 
The biggest of the Alaskan gulls is the glaucous, or “burgomas¬ 
ter”—the first birds every year to reach the coasts that girt the polar 
seas. “Their hoarse cries,” Nelson tells us, “are welcome sounds to 
the seal-hunter as he wanders over the ice-fields far out to sea 
in early spring. They become more and more numerous until they 
are very common. They wander restlessly along the coast until the 
ponds open on the marshes near the sea, and then, about the last half 
of May, they are found straying singly or in pairs about the marshy 
ponds, where they seek their summer homes. Here they are among 
the noisiest of the wildfowl.” 
Not all, however, go to the remote North, for the burgomasters 
spread all over the coast-regions from the Aleutians northward, and 
in June construct their nests on some islet in a marsh or pond, form¬ 
ing a conspicuous hillock, two or more feet high, made of tufts of 
grass and moss torn up near by, and heaped into a pile with a basin¬ 
like hollow in the top where the eggs are deposited. 
Its relative, the glaucous-winged gull, on the contrary, breeds 
on “the faces of rugged clififs, at whose bases the waves are continu¬ 
ally breaking.” Nelson’s and the Bonaparte gull are rare in this dis¬ 
trict, but the beautiful short-billed gull is to be seen in abundance in 
summer, haunting the marshes far in the interior as well as near the 
coast, as also is Sabine’s gull, which forms nesting-colonies on islets 
in the ponds scattered over the tundra. 
Of the eiders three species are seen along the northern coasts of 
Alaska—the spectacled, the Pacific, and the king eider. The first- 
named has a very limited breeding-range, close to the coast, from the 
Kuskokwim northward, and nests in colonies, its homes hidden among 
tussocks of marsh-grass. These eiders are very quiet and retiring 
in their domestic life, but their flesh and skins are of so much value 
to the Eskimos that they are killed in great numbers, and every 
efifort should be made to save them. The Pacific eider, which the 
whalers at Point Barrow call canvasback , has a far broader breed¬ 
ing-range. Nelson describes its nesting-place as “usually a dry spot 
close to a small pond or tide-creek, and not often in close proximity 
44 
