l84 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
[Sept. 5, 18%. 
brush. In each case, although the young were just out of 
the nest, their instinct did not fail them at a critical time. 
The game bird took greater chances, but was equal to it. 
Last winter I was surprised at the courage of the well- 
known bird commonly called the gray strike. This bird 
had been catching an English sparrow nearly every day 
during the prevailing cold spell and had a large fir tree 
and a thorn apple bush as his headquarters and butcher 
shop. Under this bush were wings, feathers and parts of 
many sparrows. One day, seeing him eating something 
that looked larger than usual, I went down to the bush 
and found he had one of his own kind partly eaten ; the 
legs and tail and part of body wpre all that was left. If 
the one that was feasting: did the killing it must have 
been an old one, a good fighter, as it showed no signs of 
the battle. Probably it was an up-to-date bird; in fact I 
think it was in its prime and I doubt if it had ever seen 
better days. A Readee. 
LABRADOR SKETCHES. 
IX.-Sea Gulls. 
[Written lor Forest and Stream by Count H. de Puyjalon, and trans- 
lated by Crawford Lindsay.] 
Gulls, with mosquitoes, fleas, bugs and unmention- 
able insects, are the pests of Labrador, 
Tbere are two principal varieties: the great black- 
backed gull {Larus marinus) and the herring gull (Larm 
argmtaius) The Acadian and Canadian fishermen call 
the former Anglais or English, and the latter Irlandais 
or Irish. 
The origin of the name Anglais, given to Larus 
marinus, is as follows: Many years ago, the dwellers on 
the coast relate, an Eaglish frigate was wrecked on a 
reef in the Gulf and all the crew were drowned. The 
sea cast up many bodies, and when the fishermen came 
to bury them they had to fight with clouds of black- 
backed gulls quarreling over the remains. These fisher- 
men called them mangeurs d' Anglais (eaters of Eaglish) 
and this has gradually been shoriened to Anglais, 
I cannot say why the herring gulls are called Irish. 
Perhaps it may be a delicate allusion to "home rule," for 
they seem to have an autonomous government in the 
spruce-clad islets of Mingan. 
All these gulls are bandits, and bandits of the worst 
kind. Their flight is powerful, their strength very great 
and they are always oppressing the weaker. Prudent 
almost to cowardice when in presence of a courageous or 
armed enemy, they axe great hypocrites and excessively 
indiscreet. A fishing boat, a canoe, a tfnt exasperates 
them. If you endeavor to approach seals basking on the 
rocks, or a flock of ducks or geese swimming on the 
water, you must be careful of gulls, for if they see you 
they will at once give notice of your presence by the most 
varied and discordant cries, and, no matter how judi- 
cious you may be in your stalking, you will lose your time 
and trouble. The denizens of the sea and beach are ac- 
customed to these warnings and immediately get out of 
danger. So it is no wonder that imprecations are hurled 
at the gulls and that they are unpopular on the coast. 
I think that these birds never sleep. You can hear 
them all night long croaking, barking, howling, hooting 
and mewing, especially when they see a camp-fire. They 
imitate all the most inharmonious cries sometimes so 
accurately that it is hard not to believe that you are sur- 
rounded by cats, dogs, seals, owls or crows. It is impos- 
sible to put a stop to the infernal row they make. I have 
often got up at night and fired my gun right and left at 
these horrid birds, hoping to frighten them away and get 
some sleep. But it was of no use; a few minutes after 
the last detonation the noise would begin again as bad as 
ever. 
Gulls are exceedingly gluttonous; they gobble up every- 
thing, whether fresh or putrid; they devour enormous 
quantities of crabs, sea mchins, lobsters and fish, espe- 
cially eels, which they catch very expertly amidst the 
sea wrack, for they do not dive. 
There is nothing more amusing than to see a gull catch 
a large lobster. Lobsters, as everyone knows, have two 
fore-claws of great strength, but so disposed that they 
cannot be brought above the thorax nor be put out side- 
ways. They must therefore always keep their front to 
the enemy. That is why they hide under rocks or keep 
their bodies and tails in holes, leaving outside only the 
formidable claws with which nature has provided them 
as a means of defense and aggression and for seizing 
their prey. But the lobster, like others, has weak mo- 
ments, and toward evening, especially in the love season, 
it leaves its retreat and comes out among the sea wrack 
carpeting the bottom of the coves, to seek the object of 
its affections. Then the truculent guU, which cares little 
for sentiment, comes on the scene at low tide. It alights 
quite close to the lobster, left almost high and dry, and 
seems entirely occupied in searching for retiring moUusks 
m the sea wrack. Then approaching gradually and 
noiselessly, it catches the unfortunate lobster by the tail 
and drags it as rapidly as possible to one of the innumer- 
able flat rocks which crop up from among the seaweed all 
along the Labrador coasc. Oace there, it kills its victim 
by turning it over on its back and smashing in fhe shell 
by means of its bill, as hard as a miner's pick axe. 
With sea urchins, crabs and small lobsters it follows the 
process we read of in the fables of our youth. It seizes 
them, flies up to a certain height and lets them fall on the 
rocks, when the shell is broken to pieces and it secures 
the contents. 
To satisfy its ravenous hunger the gull not only eats 
Crustacea, mollusks and fish; it also destroys a consider- 
able quantity of small game. The young moniacs or 
eider ducks (Somateria mollissvma) suffer greatly from its 
depredations; it gobbles them up unmercifully and in so 
furtive a manner that the unfortunate mother has barely 
time to notice the cruel fate of her progeny. When it 
finds a brood of these young birds it flops down close to 
them with as much noise as possible. The ducklings are 
frightened out of their wits, dive at once, and, according 
to their habit, disperse under water. The gull, which has 
very strong sight, observes them closely, and when the 
little palmipeds come up to the surface the gull catches 
them before they reach it, swallowing them under water 
and thereby concealing its crime, which it repeats as often 
as possible without exposing itself to an attack from the 
mother, which, although not very far-seeing, is very 
strong, and does not hesitate to attack it as soon as she 
perceives her loss. 
The gull not only commits its depredations and satisfies 
its gluttony in the sea, it also finds its way to the lakes in 
the interior. It is one of the chief agents of the dispersion 
of fish in fresh watei's. It transports, stuck to its feet by 
some special mucosity, or stored in its stomach, fish spawn, 
which it deposits or disgorges before it is decomposed or 
altered by the gastric juices. By this means many waters 
completely separated from all fish-producing sources have 
hecome stocked with various kinds of fish. It is thus also, 
in all probability, that some species which are exclusively 
salt-water fish, such as herring, or others which are partly 
salt and partly fresh-water fish, such as smelts, have be- 
come acclimatizad in fresh-water lakes, where they seem 
to have undergone but few changes in spite of their dif- 
ference of habitat and of successive reproductions. 
The gull seems monogamous, but it is so vicious that I 
would not be surprised to learn that it is immoral. The 
black- backed variety builds on the bare rocks, or in the 
•moss which covers them, a nest which does it but little 
credit, being a mere apology for a nest, in which the 
female lays three eggs, white or a dirty blue in color, with 
brown spots, especially at the bigger end. The herring 
gull, on the contrary, is more acute. It has abandoned 
the rocks on which it formerly nested and now builds its 
nests in the tops of spruce trees decapitated by the wind. 
The trees in the Mingan archipelago are covered with 
these birds, which, when seen from afar, look like lumps 
of snow. 
Gulls' eggs, though rather reddish in color, are very 
good eating, especially in omelets. They are constantly 
being taken away by the fishermen of all nationalities 
who frequent the Gulf. This is not a very great misfor- 
tune, for there are always too many gulls, but the people 
here pay little heed to a trade which outsiders find lucra- 
tive, as those eggs command a ready sale for culinary and 
other purposes. 
A day or two after they have come out of their shells 
the young black-backed gulls are strong enough to walk 
out of the nest and hide themselves in the crevices of the 
rocks at the approach of danger. If caught a few days 
before they can fiy they are very good to eat when fried 
with potatoes. Their flesh is then very tender without 
any fishy or oily taste and is very much like chicken; 
later on it becomes tough and tastes abominably. The 
parent birds feed their young on fresh fish and shellfish; 
they never give them anything putrid and their own hk- 
ing for that kind of food is acquired as they get older. 
The male guU cares very little about defending its off- 
spring; it contents itself with circling round at a great 
height, uttering piercing cries. The female is braver and 
sometimes attempts to fly at the despoiler. When their 
young are taken both male and female fly away in the 
most unconcerned manner. 
In spite of the wholesale destruction of their eggs, they 
abound in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Some islands and 
headlands are literally covered with them in the laying 
season. They are, however, very shy and wary. They 
can calculate with wonderful accuracy the distance be- 
tween them and the fowler, and can very seldom be shot 
with a fowling-piece. They are large birds — the black- 
backs especially, whose spread of wings sometimes meas- 
ures 5itt, from tip to tip. Their wings are used for 
trimming hats, and I am surprised that their feathers — 
the white ones in particular — are not more generally used 
for ornamental purposes. The thigh bones make excel- 
lent pipestems. 
Gulls are very good weather prophets, and can be thor- 
. oughly relied on as such. Thus, for instance, when those 
which are not burdened with family cares fly away in 
groups to some mossy rock to spend the night, you may 
be sure that, whatever may be the direction of the wind 
at the moment they pass you, the wind will next day 
blow in the direction in which they are flying. When 
they fly high and you are far from shore look out for 
your sails, as you will soon have to reef them; it is a sign 
of a high wind. When you see them alight on the water 
looking for caplin, lansing or sand ells and herrings ex- 
hausted and weary from being pursued by grampuses, it 
means fine weather. If, on the contrary, they skim along 
the surface without stopping, look out for rain or fog, as 
one or the other is not far off. H. pe Ptjyjalon. 
§^g ^ §ttth 
THE IOWA FEVER. 
Every year at just about the same time — in fact, at al- 
most the same hour each year — some people take the hay 
fever. Instantly and without previous warning the at- 
tack is on in full force. Just so the Iowa fever attacks 
one man that I know, but fortunately the Iowa fever puts 
him to no inconvenience except the endurance of an un- 
satisfied longing that is bard to bear, but has its compen- 
sations. The attack always comes on about August 15, 
and takes full control of the patient for an hour or two; 
then the patient forgets all about it imtil a recurrence of 
the attack, which is sure to come on in a few days. The 
twenty -third annual attack of this fever overtook me this 
evening. On the cars from Chicago to Milwaukee, after 
a good supper in the dining car, lounging in a comforta- 
ble seat, at peace with self and all the world, enjoying a 
cool breeze that was infusing new life into a body almost 
worn out by the humid heat of six weeks just past, this 
man got a smell of something which made him say, 
"That smells like the Iowa prairies." In one minute 
more the fever was on. As he lay back in the chair ap- 
parently asleep he saw, first, the rolling, breeze swept 
prairies of Adair county — an ocean of green grass gently 
waving in the breeze of a cool morning; the ocean of 
grass dotted with a few little islands of stubble. In the 
morning the sun came up out of this ocean of grass and 
in the evening sank out of sight in its bosom. Chickens 
in every stubble, chickens on every hillside, flocks of 
chickens in every patch of corn, and two men with two 
guns and two dogs owned the whole, for no others were 
there to disturb the chickens nor to tell the two sports- 
men to "git out of that." One of these men was weak, 
just up from an attack of malarial fever; but as he wan- 
dered over the prairie every breath of its pure air brought 
strength, every meal was a feast fit for the gods, every 
night full of delicious sleep, and with the awakening 
came the feeling that it was good to be alive and that life 
was worth living after all. These men did not have 
breechloaders, but just plain guns marked "W. More," 
Their dogs had no pedigrees, but they were industrious. 
were staunch on a point, and would hunt dead birds. 
They pointed thousands of live ones and found hundreds 
of dead ones. 
Three weeks of this and the scene shifts to the flat prai- 
ries of Dallas county, with their hundreds of ponds and 
sloughs, and many large islands of yellow stubble and 
thousands of acres of tall corn. Chickens in the corn 
and stubble, and chickens in the grass, quail calling along 
the edge of the brush that bordered the sides of the 
creeks, young mallards in the tall weeds and grass of 
every slough and pond, teal and other little ducks wher- 
ever there was open water, geese harrowing the sky, and 
sandhill cranes dancing in the pastures. Every morning 
and every afternoon there were whole acres of mallards 
in the stubbles, while thousands more were on the wing 
in every direction, Venly it is no wonder that the 
sportsmen of those days gave no thought to the possible 
extinction of this vast horde; but they are all gone now, 
mostly killed, and the rest drjven away, and their former 
homes drained of their water, and now covered with 
corn and cattle. 
One of these men, the one who has the fever now, 
brought his family and lived three years on the edge of 
this fowling paradise. While under the delirium of the 
fever this afternoon he thought it was Saturday after- 
noon and a pair of young mallards would be good for a 
Sunday dinner. Looking toward the big tract of stubble 
that lay east of the house, he saw a few small flocks fly- 
ing about over it, so half an hour before sundown he quit 
work and equipped himself for getting the mallards. 
First a powder flask that was hung bottom upward, the 
cord over the shoulder just long enough to let the mouth 
of the flask entf r his hip pocket, so it would not be swing- 
ing about and was always just ready to take hold of. 
Next a shot pouch arranged the same way, both flask and 
pouch having lever nozzles, so that when the nozzle was 
put in the gun muzzle a quick pressure on the lever in- 
stantly delivered the charge. Next a long nankeen coat 
just the color of the stubble, and a cap covered with 
same kind of cloth, and having a cape that hid all but the 
front part of his face. 
Now he takes the gun from the closet, wipes off the oil, 
inverts the flask over the muzzles, and drops 3 drams of 
Eowder into each. From one of the many coat pockets 
e gets two wads that he has cut from scraps of new har- 
ness leather. Drawing the ramrod, he pushes them 
swiftly down the smooth tubes, pleased with their 
smooth movement and the sharp hiss of air from the nip- 
ples, which denotes that they are clear. From another 
pocket come two Ely Bros, felt wads (he paid 30 cents a 
box for them), and these go down on top of the others. 
There is a small notch cut in opposite edges of these 
wads for the escape of the compressed air. Tapping the 
wads snugly down on the powder, he withdraws the 
ramrod, inverts the shot pouch over the muzzles, and 
drops just loz. of No. 5 shot in each. Then tearing an 
Ely wad in two, he pushes a half down each barrel and 
puts the ramrod in the thimbles. It takes some time to 
tell it, but the loading was all done in less than thirty 
seconds. 
MeanwhUe Flora and Sinner, the dogs, are on the 
anxious seat and wanting to know if they will be in it. 
The man says: "Flora, you can't go." Then Flora with 
drooping tail goes behind the house, looking back and 
licking her lips as though she would like to bite some- 
body. A wink gives Sinner to understand that he can 
go, but he is an old dog and knows he is not to cut any 
capers about it. 
After leaving the house an Ely waterproof cap is put on 
each of the nipples, and the man takes his way along a 
rail fence that divides the 200 acres of stubble into two 
fields. He has not gone far when a puff of smoke at the 
further end of the field, followed by the rising of ducks 
from the stubble, shows that Bert Harmon is out with 
the old Queen's arm, "loaded with three fingers of pow- 
der and eleven buckshot." The flocks of ducks wheel 
and circle over the field, and man and dog crouch close 
in the fence corner, but not a duck comes in range. They 
know that that old fence is dangerous. Presently they 
all leave except one hungry young mallard intent on a 
supper of wheat; he finally settles in the stubble 200yds. 
away. Lying flat in the stubble, the man begins a sneak 
toward the duck. Whenever the duck's head is down 
the man drags himself along; when the duck's head is 
up the man is motionless. After ten minutes of tiresome 
crawling the man is within 50yds. Then the duck grows 
suspicious and stands with head and neck stretched high, 
and a moment later takes wing. Too far away, but — 
bang! and the duck comes down with a broken wing. 
Old Sinner bounds from the fence corner and proudly 
bears the duck back to the fence. 
It is now sundown and no ducks are in sight. Man and 
dog wait in the fence corner until dusk, but not without 
hope, for during the afternoon the man noted a number 
of flecks of brant going south to feed on the stubbles of 
Quaker Divide, and he knows they will return to the 
ponds to roost. Already several have passed by out of 
range, but now the gabbling of a large flock is heard, and 
a little later they are outlined against the sky — a disor- 
derly mob of fifty or sixty, flying low, and talking and 
laughing among themselves. On they come straight 
toward the man until within 200yds. , when there is a vol- 
canic explosion from Harmon's old Queen's arm 300yds. 
to their left, and they swerve away from it, going 60 or 
•TOyds. to one side of the man in the fence corner. Old 
Sinner whines and the man jumps to his feet and "lets 
'em have it" with both barrels. They shoot upward 50ft. 
and fill the air with insane screams and gabblings — all 
but one, which did not spring up with the rest, but. leav- 
ing the flock, flaps laboriously away to the east and slant- 
ing downward. Sinner whines. "Be quiet 1" said the 
man sharply, and nothing was heard but the gabbling of 
the now distant flock. The wounded bird had disap- 
peared as soon as it sank below the sky line. "Listen, 
Smner;" and the old dog stood with high head and 
pricked up ears, slowly waving his tail in long sweeps 
that showed the pent up excitemsnt in his mind. "Thert! 
hear that flapping of wings against the stubble ? He's 
down, Smntr; fetch him !" And Sinner with a sup- 
pressed whine was off into the darkness, but his course 
was easily traced by the swish of his rapidly moving If gs 
through the stubble. Presently the sounds denoted un- 
certain movements on the part of the dog, but after a 
few minutfs came the sound of struggling wings, and 
soon after Sinner laid the brant at the man'sfett. "Want 
to carry the duck. Sinner ?" The dog picked up the duck, 
the man took the brant, and these two friends — the man 
