68 GULLS 1. Alfred Newton, the great British Zoologist and author of The Dictionary of Birds seriously questioned the wisdom of separating the Skuas, Gulls, Terns and Skimmers, all placed in the genus Larus by Linnaeus, into separate families (see Ency. Brit., 11th ed., Vol. 12, 714), and the last three were indeed so placed by Blanford and Oats in the first edition of The Fauna of British India (Birds), but, following the classification of Lowe, Stuart Baker has separated them into distinct families in the second edition and yet he admits the correctness of the earlier grouping of all three in a single family. Since I have followed throughout the plan of the second edition I must stick to it in the case of these birds as well. 2. Gulls, the "most beautiful dwellers of the coasts and marshes" are medium to fairly large sized birds with long, moderately broad wings, almost square cut tails and webbed feet. The bill is stout and wedge- shaped with the upper mandible hooked at the tip, and when hunting for food they usually fly with their bills nearly on a line with their body. The predominating colour of the adult birds is white with a grey mantle, varying in shade from the most delicate pearl-grey to dark blackish-slate, and the head often more or less marked with black in summer. The seasonal change is not great and affects chiefly the colour of the head. The young are a mottled brown and take three or four years to assume the adult plumage. They are grand fliers and show perfect mastery of the air and wind, remarkably quick and clever in their manoeuvres. They have voracious appetites and live mostly on dead fish, floating garbage, offal of all sorts, insects, grasshoppers, etc. They are in fact perfect scavengers of the waters and coastal areas just as the Vultures are on the land. They pick up their food from the surface of the water and never dive for it like the Terns, but they are experts in catching with their feet any tit bits thrown up to them in the air. They often swim and rest on the water floating highly like the Ducks. The Terns, on the other hand, are of a small to medium size with long, tapering wings, deeply forked tails, narrow and straight bills, short legs and small webbed feet. Expert on the wing, their flight is exceedingly graceful and when out for their fish food they carry their bills pointed downward, scanning the waters below with their searching eyes for an Gulls 339 individual fish or shoals of small fish at which they dive from a height of 10 to 20 feet. Unlike the Gulls they never touch any dead or putrid stuff. The colour scheme of their body plumage is, in the majority of cases, similar to that of the Gulls-black on the head, grey on the upper and white on the lower parts. Writing of these birds in his interesting little book, Birds of the Sea R. M. Lockley observes that the Gulls and Terns are closely related. "They seem to fly like embodied spirits clad in grey and white, though some have black hoods and some have black on their wings. The long-winged and long-tailed Terns are altogether more volatile and dainty and less aggressive than the larger and heavier built Gull-tribe." Both are sociable, breed in large dense colonies, and are very noisy when feeding in company and at their nesting grounds. 3. Of the nearly fifty known species of Gulls in the world seven are represented in India, four along the coasts and four of these occur also on large inland rivers, lakes, and marshes. All except the Sooty Gull and the Slender-billed Gull, which breed on islands off the Mekran coast and on the Mekran coast respectively and may be called resident birds, are winter visitors with us. The Brown-headed Gull breeds on the lakes and marshes of Ladakh in Kashmir and further east in Tibet. The Indo-Aryans may well have been familiar with the Gull and its breeding habits before they moved into India but at any rate they must have got to know about those breeding nearer home. 4. Four of the species that spend the winter in North India are briefly described below: (1) The Great Black-headed Gull (length 26", wing-expanse 68") has black head and neck, the upper parts pale grey and the lower parts. white. The bill is yellow and the legs and feet yellow to orange yellow. In winter the head and neck become white streaked with black but the summer garb is assumed as the bird leaves India for its breeding home in Central Asia by about March-April. Its great size and magnificent flight render it conspicuous wherever it occurs. In India it is found on all the great rivers. In addition to the usual food of the tribe this Gull has a bad reputation for stealing the young and eggs of other birds. Its call is a very loud raucous cry, much like that of the Greater Black-backed Gull, which is described as a low ha-ha-ha-ha, a braying ha-ha-ha, a deep keow- keow, a short barking note and a long drawn moan (Birds of America, 1936). (2) The Black-headed or Laughing Gull (length 16") is about the size of a Crow but with a much longer wing-expanse. In summer the head
- The male Gull invites the female for copulation but amongst the Terms either may
invite either, and, unlike most other birds, copulation may be continued by the Black- headed Gulls and common Terns even after the eggs have hatched (J. Fisher in Watching Birds, p. 173-Pelican Books). During courtship the Greater Black-backed, the Lesser Black-backed and the Herring Gulls indulge in communal aerial dances (J. Fisher in Bird Recognition. pp. 140 ff. Pelican Books).
