“SUPER-SEAGULLS”

Northland Age, Volume IX, Issue 16, 28 November 1939, Page 3

“SUPER-SEAGULLS”

Alleged Enemies of Trout

Occasionally a report comes from Christchurch about diving feats of black-backed gulls which are charged with crimes against trout. “They must have super-seagulls in that city,” comments a Wellington member of the Forest and Bird Protection Society. “During the past thirty years I have frequently strolled along the Wellington waterfront where blackbacked and red-billed gulls can be always seen fossicking for food. Sometimes I have seen very large shcals of small herring and mackerel swimming close, to the surface, but never once have I seen one of those gulls dive for such a tit-bit. I have seen a swimming black-back try to snap up one of the fish which almost touched its feathers, but it failed. Only once have I seen black-backs seize live herrings, and that was after the fish had been affected by liquid discharged from a steamer. They struggled to the surface where they flopped about helplessly and were easy prey for the gulls. “I have a belief that trout taken by gulls from the Avon river must be sickly specimens lacking the wellknown agility of healthy trout. There is plenty of household drainage into that stream, which is sometimes polluted. This may explain the seagulls’ seizure of weakened trout which were probably doomed to death, even if the birds had not caught them.

“The charge against the gulls js another reminder of the need of accurate research and study of wild life.”

Little things do count—heavily at times. Consider for example, the mosquito’s stinger, or proboscis. That pleasant little thing weighs just 0.0000006 of an ounce. ☆ * * During the first ten days of the “black-out” 38 people were killed and 975 injured in the London metropolitan area. For the previous ten days the figures were 8 killed and 316 injured. The toll of war.

Fritz Thyssen, the steel magnate, v.' o financed Hitler in his rise to power, has fled from Germany, says the French “Agence Radia.”

ADVERTISING doesn’t jerk—it pulls. It begins very gently, but the pull is steady. It increases day by day and year by year, until it exerts an irresistible power.