BIRD PELLETS—EVIDENCE AS TO FOOD OF BIRDS. 141
Glaucous Gull.
Mr. H. W. Feilden, the well-known ornithologist, records
how he visited a breeding place of this species, the rock-ledges
being "covered with the ordure and castings of the birds, and
the remains of Little Auks."104
Ivory Gull.
It is recorded by Seebohm that Captain M'Clintock found the
remains of lemmings round a nest of the Ivory Gull, "and also
fresh pellets consisting of their hair and bones."105
Great Skua.
Major Feilden found castings of this bird, composed
principally of the bones and feathers of Kittiwakes, near the
nesting colony on the Faroe Islands.106
Great Crested Grebe.
Red-Necked Grebe.
Slavonian Grebe.
Eared Grebe.
All the above Grebes are believed to throw up castings.
Agglutinated oval masses of their own feathers swallowed during
preening have been found in their stomachs by various observers,
including J. E. Harting, and "these, in all probability, would have
been cast up in due time had the birds not been shot."107
Mr. J. Vincent, in a recent number of British Birds,108
records finding a hard ball of vegetable matter (? Potamogeton)
in the gizzard of a Great Crested Grebe on dissection. This was.
probably a pellet in course of formation.
Little Grebe.
A bird of this species from Felsted, Essex, now in the Essex
Museum, was found on dissection to contain in its crop recogni-
sable fronds of Lemna trisulca, various elytra of the water beetle,
Brychius elevatus, and several broken elytra of another aquatic
beetle, Deronectes sp. (either depressus or 12-pustulatus), also a
small angular fragment of flint; no trace of a pellet in course of
104 Zoologist, 1878, p. 383
105 British Birds, 1885, iii., p. 338
106 Cf. Seebohm s British Birds 1885, iii., p. 348. Saunders's British Birds, 1889, p. 672.
Miss Frances Pitt (in British Birds, Dec. 1922, p. 179) observed castings of this bird, with
droppings and feathers, littering the ground at a standing place frequented by the Skuas.
107 Cf. Zoologist, 1889, p 21; ibid 1865, pp. 9449, 9565, and 9619. Saunders's British
Birds, 1889, p 702
108 British Birds, xv. 1922, p. 290.