THE BLACK-HEADED GULL. 409 



Mr. J. H. Gurney^ jun., says, in ^Rambles of a Naturalist/ (p. 292) : — 

 "In 1860 about 16,000 eggs had been gathered. In 1872, when I 

 went again, only 4000 were taken. This sad falling off was due to dry 

 seasons. Brown, the keeper, told me that once the farmers spread the 

 fields in the neighbourhood with manure sown with salt, which poisoned 

 the worms &c. upon which the Gulls fed, and that a great number died in 

 consequence. He said they suffered from stoats and rats ; he had, on one 

 occasion, 150 of the nestlings and eggs just chipping destroyed by a stoat." 



In Ray's ' Willughby ' we find the following (Book III. p. 347) : — 

 ^' Of this kind also are those birds which yearly build and breed 

 at Norbury, in Staffordshire, in an island in the middle of a great pool 

 in the grounds of Mr. Skrimshew, distant at least thirty miles from the sea. 

 When the young are almost come to their full growth, those intrusted by the 

 lord of the soil drive them off from the island, through the pool, into nets set 

 on the banks to take them. When they have taken them they feed them on 

 the entrails of beasts, and when they are fat sell them for fourpence 

 or fivepence a-piece. They take yearly about a thousand two hundred 

 young ones : whence may be computed what profit the lord makes 

 of them''* 



Pennant states (vol. ii. p. 189) :— 



''The young were formerly highly esteemed, and numbers were 

 annually taken and fattened for the table. Whitelock, in his 'Annals,' 

 mentions a piece of ground near Portsmouth which produced the owner £40 

 a year by the sale of Pewits, or this species of Gull." 



In the Regulations of the household of the 5th Earl of Northumberland 



* Not such nice food as Macaulay (' History of England/ vol. i. p. 346) describes : — When 

 the Court went to visit Tunbridge Wells at the Eestoration^ there were only huts^ and '^ the wives 

 and daughters of the Kentish farmers came from the neighbouring villages with cream, cherries, 

 wheatears, and quails/' and flirted with the courtiers. 



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