“THEM THAT ROOSTED OUT ON THE NET STAKES”
He is interesting to the eye when proudly walking along the beach, or sitting silently, with hundreds of others, in solemn conclave on the shore. Old piles and floating objects in the lake have an added interest with his trim figure perched upon them. The perched birds seem magnified and ghostly when one comes suddenly upon them in the fog and they disappear with shrill cries into the mists.
There is no gleam of human interest in the eye of a gull. It is fierce, cold, and utterly wild. The birds we love most are those that nest in the land in which we live. The home is the real bond among living things, and our feathered friends creep easily into our affections when we can hear their love songs and watch their home life.
The transient winged tribes, that come and go—like ships on the sea—and rear their young in other lands, arouse our poetic reflections, challenge our admiration, and excite our love of the beautiful. They delight our eyes but not our hearts.
The graceful forms of the gulls give an ethereal note of exaltation to the spirit of the landscape—a suggestion of the Infinite—as they soar in long curves in the azure blue, or against the dark clouds that roll up in portentous masses from the distant horizon and sweep across the heavens over the great lake. They are the heralds of the storms, and a typical expression of life in the sky.
Their matchless grace on the wing, as they wheel in the teeth of the tempest or glide with set pinions in the currents of the angry winds, makes them a part of nature’s dramas in the heavens—aloof and remote from earthly things—mingling with the unseen forces and mysteries of the Great Unknown.
These rovers of the clouds seem to love no abodes but the stormy skies and foaming waves. Their flights are desultory when the winds are still. When the calms brood over the face of the waters, they congregate on the glassy surface, like little white fleets at anchor, and rest for hours, until hunger again takes them into the air.
They often leave the lake and soar over the dune country on windy days, searching far inland for food, but when night comes they return to the water.
In early August they come down from the Lake Superior country and from the more distant north, where perhaps many of them have spent the summer near the arctic circle. They bring with them their big brown young, from the rocky islands in those remote regions, and to these islands they will return in the spring. The young birds do not don their silver-gray plumage until the second year.