126 BULLETIN OF WISCONSIN NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY. VOL. 4. NO. 4. 
attacks that came under my observation consisted only of a few 
jabs of the beak on any part of the body, and none ended 
seriously. 
In a recent article in a popular magazine descriptive of a gull 
colony at Lower Klamath Lake, Oregon, Finley writes : "By 
watching the actions of the parents, I soon discovered that their 
greatest anxiety seemed to be to keep their children crouching low 
in the nest, so that they would not run away and get lost in the 
crowd. I saw one young gull start to run off through the reeds, 
but he hadn't gone a yard before the mother dived at him with a 
blow that sent him rolling. He got up dazed and started off in a 
new direction, but she rapped him again on the head till he was 
glad to crouch down in the dry reeds. 
"The parents seemed to recognize their own chicks largely by 
location. Several times I saw old birds pounce upon youngsters 
that were running about and beat them unmercifully. It seemed 
to be as much the duty of a gull mother to beat her neighbor's 
children, if they didn't stay home, as to whip her own if they 
moved out of the nest, but often this would lead to a rough-and- 
tumble fight among the old birds. 
"Some times a young gull would start to swim off in the water, 
but it never went far before it was pounced upon and driven back 
shoreward." 
Writing of the disagreeable conditions accompanying his 
observations he says : "We had to breathe the foulest kind of 
air on account of the dead birds and decaying fish scattered 
about * * * *." 
Although the conditions at Finley' s colony were somewhat 
different from those at Gravel Island, I am inclined to believe 
that the attacks on the young that he mentions, particularly when 
we consider the number of dead that polluted the air. were not 
greatly dissimilar to what I have described. The cause that he 
assigns for these beatings would not, how r ever, be at all applicable 
to the Gravel Island occurrences. 
In a description of the Laysan Albatross. Fisher, following an 
account of the regurgitation of food for the young, writes : "The 
young bird is not at all modest in its demands, but keeps asking for 
more. The old bird now pecks back in an annoyed manner, and 
if the other still urges, she arises and walks off, usually to some 
