98 A YEAR OF SPORT AND NATURAL HISTORY. 



winter the beak is smaller and much duller in colour, 

 becoming larger and brighter in the ensuing spring. The larger 

 size of the bill in the summer may have reference to the manner 

 in which the birds feed their young with the herring fry and other 

 small fish. These they not only capture while swimming under 

 the water, but in an ingenious manner manage to arrange them 

 transversely with their beaks, so that an old Puffin may be seen 

 coming to its young with as many as eight small fish held 

 transversely in its mouth, the tails hanging out on either side. 



The Kittiwake is one of the commonest of English gulls, and, 

 unfortunately for itself, one of the most persecuted. Daring the 

 time that the cruel fashion prevailed of wearing the wings of gulls 

 in ladies' hats, hundreds of thousands of these birds were destroyed 

 in the most reckless and brutal manner. When the old birds came 

 to lay their eggs and rear their young on the coasts, as at 

 Clovelly, Isle of May, at Ballandra, Lundy Island, and similar 

 places, hundreds of thousands of them were shot for the 

 plumassiers. In Clovelly alone it is said that'ten thousand birds 

 were destroyed in the first fortnight of the nesting season. Mr. 

 Saunders tells that in many cases the wings. were torn off the 

 wounded birds before they were dead, and the mangled victims 

 tossed back into the water, and hundreds of young birds were to 

 be seen dying of starvation in the nests, owing to the destruction of 

 the parents. The Kittiwake, unlike the other gulls, rarely comes 

 inland, not even searching the maritime pastures or ploughed 

 fields along the shores for worms and larvae like the other gulls. 

 Its habits, however, may be studied by those who are steaming 

 about, or who are accompanying the herring boats in the North 

 Sea, as these birds devour large quantities of herrings and sprats. 



