124 BLACK-HEADED, OR LAUGHING GULL. 
quiring knowledge regarding the habits of our birds, and should much 
like to learn from you the reasons why these gulls went off in lines 
from their breeding grounds, and returned in an extended front? 
Was it, in the latter case, because they were afraid of passing their 
nests unknowingly ; or, in the former, under the necessity of follow- 
ing an experienced leader, who, under the stimulus of an empty maw, 
readily undertook the office, but who, like many other bon-vivants, be- 
came in the evening too dull to be of use to his companions ? 
This species breeds, according to the latitude, from the Ist of 
March to the middle of June; and I have thought that on the Tortuga 
Keys, it produced two broods each season. In New Jersey, and far- 
ther to the eastward, the nest resembles that of the Ring-billed Gull, 
or Common American Gull, Larus zonorhynchus, being formed of dried 
sea-weeds, and land plants, two and sometimes three inches high, with 
a regular rounded cavity, from four and a half to five inches in diame- 
ter, and an inch and a half in depth. This cavity is formed of finer 
grasses, placed in a pretty regular circular form. I once found a nest 
formed as it were of two; that is to say, two pairs had formed a nest 
of nearly double the ordinary size, and the two birds sat close to each 
other during rainy weather, but separately, each on its own three eggs. 
I observed that the males, as well as the females, thus concerned in 
this new sort of partnership, evinced as much mutual fondness as if 
they were brothers. On the Tortugas, where these Gulls also breed 
in abundance, I found their eggs deposited in slight hollows scooped 
in the sand. Whilst at Galveston, in Texas, I found their nests 
somewhat less bulky than in the Jerseys, which proved to me how 
much birds are guided in these matters by differences in atmospheric 
temperature and locality. 
I never found more than three eggs in anest. Their average length 
is two inches and half an eighth, their greatest breadth a trifle more 
than an inch and a half. They vary somewhat in their general tint, 
but are usually of a light earthy olive, blotched and spotted with dull 
reddish-brown and some black, the markings rather more abundant to- 
wards the larger end. Asan article of food, they are excellent. These 
gulls are extremely anxious about their eggs, aswell as their young, which 
are apt to wander away from the nest while yet quite small. They are 
able to fly at the end of six weeks, and soon after this are abandoned 
by their parents, when the old and young birds keep apart in flocks 
a 
