morsel and snatch it with open mouth. The pomarine is confined in 

 summer to the most northern coasts, but the other two abound all 

 over the tundras and nearer Aleutian Islands, laying two, dark-green, 

 profusely spotted eggs on the bare ground. In summer they fly far 

 inland, catching field-mice and lemmings, robbing the nests of ducks 

 and other birds, searching the beaches and river-banks for dead fish, 

 and even eating berries. 



The biggest of the Alaskan gulls is the glaucous, or "burgomas- 

 ter" — the first birds every year to reach the coasts that girt the polar 

 seas. "Their hoarse cries," Nelson tells us, "are welcome sounds to 

 the seal-hunter as he wanders over the ice-fields far out to sea 

 in early spring. They become more and more numerous until they 

 are very common. They wander restlessly along the coast until the 

 ponds open on the marshes near the sea, and then, about the last half 

 of May, they are found straying singly or in pairs about the marshy 

 ponds, where they seek their summer homes. Here they are among 

 the noisiest of the wildfowl." 



Not all, however, go to the remote North, for the burgomasters 

 spread all over the coast-regions from the Aleutians northward, and 

 in June construct their nests on some islet in a marsh or pond, form- 

 ing a conspicuous hillock, two or more feet high, made of tufts of 

 grass and moss torn up near by, and heaped into a pile with a basin- 

 like hollow in the top where the eggs are deposited. 



Its relative, the glaucous-winged gull, on the contrary, breeds 

 on "the faces of rugged cliffs, at whose bases the waves are continu- 

 ally breaking." Nelson's and the Bonaparte gull are rare in this dis- 

 trict, but the beautiful short-billed gull is to be seen in abundance in 

 summer, haunting the marshes far in the interior as well as near the 

 coast, as also is Sabine's gull, which forms nesting-colonies on islets 

 in the ponds scattered over the tundra. 



Of the eiders three species are seen along the northern coasts of 

 Alaska — the spectacled, the Pacific, and the king eider. The first- 

 named has a very limited breeding-range, close to the coast, from the 

 Kuskokwim northward, and nests in colonies, its homes hidden among 

 tussocks of marsh-grass. These eiders are very quiet and retiring 

 in their domestic life, but their flesh and skins are of so much value 

 to the Eskimos that they are killed in great numbers, and every 

 effort should be made to save them. The Pacific eider, which the 

 whalers at Point Barrow call canvasback , has a far broader breed- 

 ing-range. Nelson describes its nesting-place as "usually a dry spot 

 close to a small pond or tide-creek, and not often in close proximity 



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