"That will be splendid," said the Doctor. "I think your friend should be very helpful to us."
So the gull, after thanking the Doctor and Dab-Dab for a very excellent luncheon, took a couple of postcards which were going to Angola and flew off to get One Eye, the albatross.
Later in the afternoon the gull returned and with him came the great One Eye, oldest of bird weather prophets.
The Doctor said afterward that he had never seen a bird who reminded him so much of a sailor. He had the rolling, straddling walk of a seafaring man; he smelt strongly of fish; and whenever he spoke of the weather he had an odd trick of squinting up at the sky with his one eye, the way old sailors often do.
He agreed with the Doctor that the idea of a bird weather bureau was quite a possible thing and would lead to much better weather reports than had so far been possible. Then for a whole hour and a half he gave the Doctor a lecture on winds. Every word of this John Dolittle wrote down in a notebook.
Now the wind is the chief thing that changes the weather. And if, for instance, you know that it is raining in the Channel Islands at tea-time on a Thursday—and there's a northeast wind blowing—you can be pretty sure that the rain will reach England some time Thursday night.
The next thing that the Doctor did was to write to all the branch postmasters and have them arrange exactly with the different kinds of birds a time for them to start their yearly migrations—not just the second week in November, or anything like that—but an exact day and hour. Then by knowing how fast each kind of bird flies, he could calculate almost to a minute what time they should arrive at their destination. And if they were late in arriving, then he would know that bad weather had delayed them on the way or that they had put off their starting till storms died down.
The Doctor, the gull, One Eye, Dab-Dab, Cheapside, Speedy-the-Skimmer and Too-Too the mathematician put their heads together and discussed far into the night, working out a whole lot more arrangements and particulars for running a good weather bureau. And a few weeks later a second brand new notice board appeared on the walls of the Doctor's post office, beside the one for Outgoing and Incoming Mails.
The new notice board was marked at the top Weather Reports, and would read something like this:
The Green Herons were one day, three hours and nine minutes late in their arrival at Cape Horn from the Sandwich Islands. Wind coming south-southeast. Blustery weather can be expected along the west coast of Chili and light gales in the Antarctic Sea.