BIRD PELLETS—EVIDENCE AS TO FOOD OF BIRDS. 139
the Black-headed Gull is given by Mr. Robert Newstead in his
Supplement to the Journal 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 larvae—leather
jackets. During the plague of these insects which devastated
the Dee Marshes in 1901, 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 (in. litt. Sept. 27, 1919) 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,96 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-
95 Quoted by Pycraft in British Birds, 1908-9, p. 316.
96 Land and Water, Aug. 21, 1919.
97 Essex Naturalist, xvi., p. 120.
98 Zoologist, 1880, p. 362.