BLACK-HEADED, OR LAUGHING GULL. 121 
will be broadly tipped, or marked at the end, with a white spot, which 
in some instances will be found to be fully half an inch in size; yet 
the tail of these birds, as if to prove that they are adults, is as purely 
white to its extreme tip, as in those that are breeding ; but neither the 
breast, nor the under wing-coverts, will exhibit the rosy tint of one in 
the full perfection of its powers. 
The males of all the Gulls with which I am acquainted, are larger 
than the females ; and this difference of size is observable in the young 
birds even before they are fully fledged. In all of these, however, put- 
ting aside their sex, I have found great differences of size to exist, some- 
times as much as two inches in length, with proportional differences in 
the bills, tarsi, and toes ; and this, in specimens procured from one flock 
of these gulls at a single discharge of the gun, and at different seasons of 
the year. The colour of their bills too is far from being always alike, be- 
ing brownish-red in some, purplish or of a‘rich and deep carmine in 
others. As to the white spots on the extremities of the primary quills 
of birds of this family, I would have you, Reader, never to consider 
them as affording essential characters. Nay, if you neglect them al- 
together, you will save yourself much trouble, as they will only mis- 
lead you by their interminable changes, and you may see that the spots 
on one wing are sometimes different in size and number from those on 
the other wing of the same specimen. [f all this be correct, as I assure 
you it must be, being the result of numberless observations made in 
the course of many years, in the very places of resort of our different 
Gulls, will you not agree with me, Reader, that the difficulty of dis- 
tinguishing two very nearly allied species must be almost insuperable 
when one has nothing better than a few dried skins for objects of ob- 
servation and comparison ? 
The Black-headed Gull may be said to be a constant resident along 
the southern coast of the United States, from South Carolina to the 
Sabine River; and I have found it abundant over all that extent both 
in winter and in summer, but more especially on the shores and keys 
of the Floridas, where I found it breeding, as well as on some islands 
in the Bay of Galveston in Texas. A very great number of these birds 
however remove, at the approach of spring, towards the Middle and 
Eastern Districts, along the shores of which they breed in considerable 
numbers, particularly on those of New Jersey and Long Island, as well 
