"Maybe. But, after all, if you want to be a good seaman the sea is the thing that counts, isn't it? That's the thing you've got to look at—to study. Now, we sea birds spend nearly all our lives, night and day, Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter, looking at the sea. And what is the result?" asked the gull, taking a fresh piece of toast from the rack that Dab-Dab handed him. "The result is this: we know the sea. Why, Doctor, if you were to shut me up in a little box with no windows in it and take me out into the middle of any ocean you liked and then opened the box and let me look at the sea—even if there wasn't a speck of land in sight—I could tell you what ocean it was, and, almost to a mile, what part of it we were in. But, of course, I'd have to know what date it was."
"The gull took a fresh piece of toast"
"Marvelous!" cried the Doctor. "How do you do it?"
"From the color of it; from the little particles of things that float in it; from the kind of fishes and sea creatures swimming in it; from the way the little ripples rippled and the big waves waved; from the smell of it; from the taste, the saltness of it and a couple of hundred other things. But, you know, in most cases—not always, but in most cases—I could tell you where we were with my eyes shut, as soon as I got out of the box, just from the wind blowing on my feathers."
"Great heavens!" the Doctor exclaimed. "You don't say!"
"That's the main trouble with sailors, Doctor. They don't know winds the way they ought. They can tell a northeast wind from a west wind. And a strong one from a weak one. And that's about all. But when you've spent most of your life, the way we have, flying among the winds, using them to climb on, to swoop on and to hover on, you get to know that there's a lot more to a wind besides its direction and its strength. How often it puffs upward or downward, how often it grows weak or grows strong, will tell you, if you know the science of winds, a whole lot."