86 Brewster, Notes on the Flight of Gulls. LJan. 



ment, while their vertical deflections from a horizontal plane of 

 flight were never greater than ten or fifteen inches. Yet all the 

 while the beautiful birds were keeping exact pace with us and mov- 

 ing at a known speed of sixteen miles an hour against a wind having 

 an estimated velocity of considerably more than that. Xor was 

 this the best that they could do for every now and then one which 

 had fallen behind the rest would overtake its companions without 

 flapping or other visible effort although going — perhaps for hun- 

 dreds of yards — at almost double their rate of speed. How could 

 such a thing be? It seemed unbelievable yet the fact was before 

 our eyes and not to be discredited, however difficult to understand 

 or explain. Those of us who first witnessed and afterwards dis- 

 cussed it agreed in thinking that the gliding birds could not acquire 

 any considerable amount of their momentum by their slight and 

 infrequent swoops or occasional wing strokes. Indeed they seemed, 

 oddly enough, to lose rather than to gain headway whenever thej' 

 flapped vigorously. It was suggested that their chief if not only 

 means of propulsion must be that of the force of the wind, acting 

 on their set wings somewhat as it does on the sails of a vessel, 

 but objected that no sailing vessel can head within three points 

 of the wind and move forward through the water or fail, when 

 going to windward, to make more or less leeway; whereas the 

 Gulls headed within two points and had no perceptible drift to 

 leeward. 



On August 2, 1911, I was again returning from England to 

 America — this time in company with my friends Dr. and Mrs. 

 Glover M. Allen — w-hen our steamship, the White Star liner 

 'Arabic' was attended, during most of the afternoon and for a dis- 

 tance of above a hundred miles off the south coast of Ireland, by 

 from fifty to two hundred Gulls, the number varying from hour to 

 hour within these limits. Nearly all were adult Herring Gulls still 

 in full nuptial plumage. A few followed the creamy wake of the 

 ship or poised directly over her just to the rear of her smoke stack 

 but the majority kept abreast of her to the windward side, the 

 somewhat sheltered lee side being persistently avoided. On a 

 level with her upper deck or a little above it, they were generally 

 and rather evenly distributed — although more thickly in places 

 than in others — all the way from her stern to amidships, some 



