OCT. 1906. 
HERRING GULL AND CASPIAN TERN. 
125 
then picked up small pieces of wood in their beaks, put them down 
and again picked them up. Another sortie was again blocked, 
followed by more picking up and putting down of beach debris. 
Herrick mentions that often the gulls' sparring bouts come to 
naught "when one or both birds seem suddenly to lose all interest 
in the quarrel, and begin to pick up chips, pull grass, or stab a 
rotten log with their strong, chisel-pointed bills." In this case 
these actions were performed in an apparently ostentatious man- 
ner, and I could not help thinking that by them it was intended 
to convey some information to the restrained bird. 
I was quite unable to determine why the young were attacked. 
In the last described occurrence the young was wounded, the 
victim of a previous attack, but in various other instances there 
was nothing in the appearance or actions of the young to distin- 
guish it to my eyes from any of the others. The habit of killing 
the young appears to be fairly common. I saw several instances 
in my short stay, and the dead bodies of young with the skin and 
flesh cut away from their occiputs were mute evidences of the 
prevalence of the revolting habit. One of the wounded young I 
removed from the island to the house where I boarded to see if 
it would recover. It would not voluntarily eat either raw or 
cooked fish or other food, so we were in the habit of opening its 
bill and pushing food down its throat. From the first it was 
evidently a doomed bird, sitting all the time huddled up, with 
scarcely life enough to offer any resistance when handled. After 
a couple of days it was evident that it was becoming thinner and 
weaker, and so it was killed. I found that below the occipital 
wound the neck was badly infested with maggots. This is prob- 
ably the cause of death of any that may escape actual killing by 
their persecutors. There was much evidence that they not infre- 
quently are directly killed by the adults, though I did not happen 
to observe any completely despatched. 
I was quite unable to see that the victims of these attacks were 
in any way abnormal, or that they had given any offense. Some 
times the victim of an attack had for some hours been unmolested 
in the midst of the adults, when, as in the instance described, it 
was set upon while in the most passive state. Rapid movement 
seemed always to excite the adults and a running young one was 
sure to be attacked by every adult near which it passed, but these 
