656 AVESGULL. 
when living animal food is not to be found, it has even been known to eat 
carrion, and whatever else offers of the kind. 
Of the gull there are about nineteen species. The largest with which we 
are acquainted is, the black and white or black-backed gull.! It generally 
weighs upwards of four pounds, and is twenty-five or twenty-six inches from 
the point of the bill to the end of the tail; and from the tip of each wing, 
when extended, five feet and several-inches. The bill appears compressed 
sideways, being more than three inches long, and hooked towards the end, 
like the rest of this kind, of a sort of orange color; the nostrils are of an 
ablong form ; the mouth is wide, with a long tongue, and very open gullet. 
The irides of the eyes are of a delightful red.. The wings and the middle or 
the back are black; only the tips of the covert and quill feathers are white. 
The head, breast, tail, and other parts of the body, are likewise white. The 
tail is near six inches long, the legs and feet are flesh-colored, and the claws 
black. There are about twenty varieties of this tribe, which are all dis- 
tinguished by an angular knob on the chap. 
Gulls are found in great plenty in every place; but it is chiefly round the 
rockiest shores, that they are seen in the greatest abundance; itis there that 
the gull breeds and brings upits young; it is there that millions of them‘are 
heard screaming with discordant notes for months together. 
1 Larus marinus, Lin. 
