MmirereLLE lSs—--EYIDENCE. AS TO FOOD OF BIRDS. 139 
the Black-headed Gul! is given by Mr. Robert Newstead in his. 
Supplement to the Jou nal of the Board of Agriculture, December 
1908, on the “ Food of Some British Birds.’”’ He says : “‘ For- 
tunately the birds were, and are still, strictly protected in this 
area’ [Chester]. ‘‘ And this because, among other things, it 
devours enormous numbers of crane-flies and their larve—leather 
jackets. During the plague of these insects which devastated 
the Dee Marshes in rgot, these Gulls gathered in hundreds to the 
feast, and gorged themselves so completely that the pellets, or 
castings, thrown up were left scattered over the land, looking 
like little bundles of dead grass.’’95 
Mr. J. E. Harting confirms this (im. litt. Sept. 27, I919) and 
adds the interesting fact that one of the pellets contained the 
remains of no less than “ 400 craneflies and 1,600 eggs, which 
had evidently been devoured in the bodies of the flies.”’ 
The Essex Museum contains at present only a single pellet 
of this species of gull, taken from a nesting place: it contains 
remains of a ground-beetle (Carabus, sp.), some fish bones, and 
some fragments of plants. 
COMMON GULL. 
Mr. E. E. Pettitt, writing in Land and Water,9° remarks 
that the Common. Gull “ even when nesting many miles inland, 
constantly travels to the coast for food, as is shown by castings 
composed of crabs and other small crustaceans lying around the 
nests.” 
HERRING GULL. 
Many records exist of pellets thrown up by these birds, and 
collected at their roosting-places. Specimens are in the Essex 
Museum, which were collected by Miss G. Lister at Mullion 
Island, near the Lizard, and duly recorded in the Essex 
NATURALIST.97 Captive birds have been observed to throw 
pellets.98 
The contents of the pellets are recorded to be of very varied 
nature, including fish-bones, green husks, horsehair, the bark of 
the tree-mallow, candle-ends (!), shells of immature mussels, 
oat husks, fragments of crabs, feathers and bones of birds, ear- 
2 2 Bee oro vs 
97 Essex NATURALIST, Xvi., p. 120. 
98 Zoologist, 1880, p. 362. 
