164 Animal Life 
hood is black, legs and feet vermilion, and wings black underneath. This last peculiarity 
is very remarkable and characteristic. It has visited Britain from time to time, and is 
known to nest in Northern Russia. The Mediterranean or Adriatic Black-headed Gull 
(L. melanocephalus) is familar enough to voyagers in the Mediterranean, and nests 
on the islets at the mouth of the Guadalquivir. It is as a visitor just on the British 
list, and that is all. The next member of the group, the Great Black-headed Gull 
(L. ichthyaétus), had up to 1889 only been once recorded in Britain. I have never 
seen this bird alive, to my knowledge (I have never been in the Levant, where its 
chief home is); but it is a big bird, nineteen inches in length. So we come to 
the Brown-headed Gull (4. ridibundus), sometimes from its voice called the Laughing 
Gull. Both in summer and winter this gull is with us, and Londoners know it well. 
The breasts of several gulls, which are not strictly “voseate,’ like Ross’s Gull, have 
a tendency towards that colour, and the breast of the Laughing Gull is rose-tinted 
in the nesting season. It 1s imdeed a lovely little gull. In the summer its head 
is dark chocolate-coloured, its back a blue-grey, its wings white and black, its tail 
white, its breast blush-white, its bill, legs, and feet brilliant flamingo-red. In winter 
it loses some of these striking 
points. Unfortunately in its 
winter dress it comes to London; 
its hood gone, or reduced to a 
simple eye-spot, its legs and 
bill less bright—in colour it is 
then very different from the 
summer bird. I think it was 
the tremendous winter of 1896 
which brought these birds to 
shelter in the Thames—the 
Thames which that winter was 
packed with ice-floes like an 
a arctic sea. They have come 
every autumn since, and seem 
to come in increasing numbers, 
contesting every bit of bun or 
bread with the wild-fowl about 
[C. Reid, Wishaw, the bridge in St. James’s Park. 
This little gull does not breed 
on cliffs or uplands, like most other gulls. It nests on marshes or quite inland on pieces 
of fresh water. Here it makes a nest of reeds or flags, which rests upon the rushes or 
bog-bean or any other flat vegetation. I have visited several of these gulleries, and it is 
a most beautiful sight to see the white birds rise in hundreds and drift about the reed- 
beds like thick-driving snow. In Northumberland is one small breeding place—Pallinsburn; 
others are in fresh water hollows on the remarkable series of old beaches at Dungeness ; 
but perhaps the most celebrated is the gullery of Scoulton Mere in Norfolk. A regular 
trade is done in the brown-headed gulls’ eggs there. Something like two thousand are 
taken there in the week. One very hot dry summer the gulls there took to catching 
field-mice—mostly, I fancy, bank voles. They brought them in to their nestlings, and 
I saw them drop them from a height on to the ground to kill them, much as you 
may see the grey crows droppimg mussels to crack their shells. 
We come now to the Common Gull (Z. canws), common only in winter. Then 
you may see them anywhere round the coast, and see them following the plough. 
Often they fly for this purpose very far inland, and return to sea in the V-shaped 
ee 3 3 we SRS 
Photograph by] HERRING GULLS FLYING. 
