"No," said the gull, "we can't see any more, it is true. But, my goodness! If we were as helpless in a fog as the sailors are we'd always be lost. What we do, if we are going anywhere special and we run into a fog, is to fly up above it—way up where the air is clear. Then we can find our way as well as ever."
"I see," said the Doctor. "But the storms, what do you do in them to keep yourselves safe?"
"Well, of course, in storms—bad storms—even seabirds can't always go where they want. We seagulls never try to battle our way against a real gale. The petrels sometimes do, but we don't. It is too tiring, and even when you can come down and rest on the water, swimming, every once in a while, it's a dangerous game. We fly with the storm—just let it carry us where it will. Then when the wind dies down we come back and finish our journey."
"But that takes a long time, doesn't it?" asked the Doctor.
"Oh, yes," said the gull, "it wastes a little time. But, you know, we very seldom let ourselves get caught by a storm."
"How do you mean?" asked John Dolittle.
"We know, before we reach one, where it is. And we go around it. No experienced sea bird ever runs his head into a bad storm."
"But how do you know where the storms are?" asked the Doctor.
"Well," said the gull, "I suppose two great advantages we birds have over the sailors in telling when and where to expect bad weather are our good eyesight and our experience. For one thing, we can always rise high in the air and look over the sea for a distance of fifty or sixty miles. Then if we see gales approaching we can turn and run for it. And we can put on more speed than the fastest gale that ever blew. And then, another thing, our experience is so much better than sailors'. Sailors, poor duffers, think they know the sea—that they spend their life on it. They don't—believe me, they don't. Half the time they spend in the cabin, part of the time they spend on shore and a lot of the time they spend sleeping. And even when they are on deck they're not always looking at the sea. They fiddle around with ropes and paint brushes and mops and buckets. You very seldom see a sailor looking at the sea."
"I suppose they get rather tired of it, poor fellows!" murmured the Doctor.