Birds. 



8271 



Yesso) early in the forenoon, we came up to Tsiuka Point at sunset, 

 and by nine p.m. were at the entrance of the Bay of Hakodadi, where 

 it fell calm. This prevented our reaching the anchorage off the town 

 until four the next morning. The harbour was crowded with saucer- 

 shaped native junks, — clumsy, unpainted, and primitive-looking craft, 

 each with one heavy single mast, used for hoisting a large square sail 

 of cotton canvas. Each of them was secured by at least three or four 

 anchors, and had half-a-dozen more grapple-looking affairs ready at 

 the bows for use in case of bad weather. Each and every one of these 

 junks was so much like another that, were it not for a slight disparity 

 in size, they might all have been supposed to have been cast in one 

 mould. Numerous boats, with creaking oars, were being pulled about 

 by naked Japanese, engaged in loading and unloading junks, while 

 the small caique-shaped canoes of the fishermen dotted the harbour 

 in all directions. The only foreign vessel (" foreign " being generally 

 applied to European and American persons and things in the far 

 East), besides our vessel the 4 Eva/ was a Russian despatch war- 

 steamer, which lay in deeper water than the junks. We took up our 

 berth near her, and discovered that she was on the point of leaving 

 for one of the new ports on the lately acquired coast of Manchouria. 

 A great number of gulls were disporting themselves over the placid 

 water of the harbour, and collecting the refuse thrown overboard from 

 the junks, or pieces of bait discarded by the fishermen ; and as 

 a thick fog precluded a distinct view of the shore, I watched these 

 birds with much interest. Although varying very considerably in 

 plumage, they were all of one kind, Larus melanurus, the only species 

 in fact, as far as my observations went, that spends the summer at 

 Hakodadi. This is, moreover, the only gull given in the ' Fauna 

 Japonica' as inhabiting the Japanese islands ; but Commodore Perry's 

 United States Expedition, which visited the country in 1854 (the 

 Ornithological Report on which, by Mr. Cassin, will be found in vol. 

 ii. of the Government publication), has added L. icthyaetus, Pallas, 

 besides a single immature specimen of what was considered to be L. 

 brunneicephalus, collected in the Bay of Yedo, on the east coast. The 

 first was said to be abundant in March. In October I observed, at 

 Hakodadi, two or three of a large species of gull, all white, except the 

 back and coverts of the wings, which were of a light slate-colour. On 

 one or two occasions I also saw a tern, certainly not Sterna fuliginosa, 

 figured in the ' Fauna Japonica,' but a small slate-blue and white 

 species. 



I think I have here enumerated all the Laridae known as belonging 



