The Zoologist— April, 1S67. 671 



The common and herring gulls were by far the most plentiful 

 though perhaps I am wrong in saying that the common was far more 

 plentiful than the herring gull. 



Glaucous Gull. — On the 12lh, during a snow storm and high wind 

 from the north-east, I shot one of these fine birds in beautiful immature 

 plumage. He was soaring along over the beach in the teeth of the 

 gale, eyeing the high-water mark at the edge of the snow, and showed 

 not the least fear of me or my gun. His dimensions were : 



Length from top of bill to lip of tail - - 2 feet 2\ inches. 



Expanse of wings - - - 5 „ 1 inch. 



"Wing from carpal joint - 1 foot 6^ inches. 



I saw an adult bird one day, but he did not come within shot of 

 the boat. 



Iceland Gull. — For a fortnight the snow lay thick and frozen down 

 to the edge of the tide, and the weather was so severe that everything 

 I shot, with the exception of ducks and geese, was miserably thin. 

 Gulls are driven to great extremities in hard weather ; they seem but 

 poorly able to look after the " commissariat." There happens to be 

 in the town a fish-curing house, situated on the beach : this was the 

 favourite resort of hundreds of starving gulls, who floated lazily on the 

 water near the shore, or sat in flocks on the shingle, regardless of 

 passers by, while others, with appetites sharpened by hunger and by 

 an odour more pleasant to their olfactory nerves than to mine, hovered 

 over the sheds and eagerly snapped up the offal thrown from the 

 windows. Among a flock of young herring gulls, who were watching 

 for fishy heads and tails, I observed a pair of young Iceland gulls, one 

 of which I was fortunate enough to shoot. In plumage he was the 

 ver y facsimile of his big cousin the " Burgomaster," and was of 

 exactly the same dimensions as a herring gull which I shot immediately 

 afterwards. How Temminck regarded this species as a variety of the 

 herring gull I cannot imagine, for it does not appear to me to resemble 

 this latter in any one stage of plumage. The young bird mentioned 

 and described by Yarrell, appears to have been a small specimen : he 

 gives its length as eighteen inches, whereas miue measured twenty-one 

 inches. The legs were flesh-colour, not yellow-broivn ; also Yarrell 

 gives the bird of the young " Burgomaster" as pale brown and the tail 

 as uniform yellowish brown. The bill of my gull is flesh-colour and 

 the tail-feathers grayish white, barred with pale brown. Both 

 specimens are now in the Museum of the Royal Artillery Institution 

 at Woolwich. 



