363 
ORNITHOLOGICAL OBSERVATIONS AND 
REFLECTIONS IN SHETLAND.* 
EDMUND SELOUS. 
(Continued from page 326). 
ALL these Kittiwakes must be young ones, for their bills are not 
coloured, but blackish, as when they first leave the nests— 
at that time also they keep together and apart from the older 
birds. They have flown up in relays from another place of 
assemblage, a green knoll higher up on the bank where they 
had been standing, but not bathing in its vicinity, and here | 
noticed a grown Herring Gull and its full-sized young one, 
standing amongst them. Before long, as the Kittiwakes kept 
flying to their bathing place, these two birds went off with one 
of the parties and stood (I cannot quite recall if they bathed) 
with the rest there. The old bird, I think, took the lead in 
thus leaving. Now why should these two Herring Gulls— 
the grown one in particular, for its chick but follows it—be 
here amongst this flock of young Kittiwakes? When the 
Herring Gull and Great Black-backed Gull, as I have noticed, 
congregate at the same place, the two species stand in separate 
groups, even though, together, they may be said to form one 
group, but these birds were just two units in the midst of a large 
alien flock. The Herring Gull, as I have myself seen, preys to 
a certain, but only, I believe, a slight extent, upon the young 
Kittiwakes, and he is also very similar in coloration to the 
latter species, when mature, though there is considerable 
difference in size. Does this resemblance help him at all at 
the expense of his ‘ food-plant’ so to speak? The young 
Herring Gull, it is true, has it not, but it is probably only the 
grown one that thus sometimes attacks the young Kittiwakes. 
Thus when one of the latter is killed, it is by an agent not so 
very like itself, it is true, but perhaps sufficiently like the parent, 
that used to feed it, to prevent its taking any alarm just before 
the attack is delivered, however close the enemy may be to him, 
and not to allow the rest of the tribe to take warning and avoid 
such contiguity in the future, as they perhaps might do did 
no such likeness exist. If, for instance, the young Herring 
Gull were to act in the same manner—which it probably does 
not—it might become an object of dread, as also, perhaps, 
the Lesser Black-backed Gull, in which the coloration is much 
more markedly different. Assuming, however, that the young 
one is pacific or passive, the Kittiwakes have no cause to fear 
it, whilst for the reasons suggested, they do not, in spite of 
what sometimes happens to them, dread the parent either. 
Thus both can stand unregarded in their midst, but supposing 
1916 Nov. 1, 
