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. I have seen a very desperate combat which I at first thought was a general scrimmage. It was not so, however. Two alone were engaged, but a cloud of gulls swept over and hovered about them, often hiding them from view. All were interested, and interested, it seemed to me, against one of the two birds who stood all the time on the defensive, beating or trying to beat off with wings and beak the continual eager rushes of his assailant. Many times they closed and went struggling and flapping over the ground, attended all the time by gulls in the air and gulls walking about and near them. When they disengaged, the same bird—as I inferred from the dramatic unity of its conduct—attacked again in the same eager way, as though the greater vivacity of its feelings or disposition made it always more quick than the other, though this one was equally brave and determined. One might almost fancy that the attacking gull had had some great wrong done it by the one it attacked. This latter, however, a powerful and steady fighter, finally beat off its assailant, who now took to the air. Sweeping backwards and forwards above the hated one, it made each time that it passed a little drop down upon it with dangling legs and delivered, or tried to deliver, a blow with the feet, a strategy which the other met by springing up and striking with the beak.

Such a conflict as this makes quite a commotion in the gull world, all those birds that have been standing anywhere in the neighbourhood flying and circling excitedly about above the combatants, or settling and walking up to them. I did not see the casus belli, so merely assume it to have been jealousy between two rival males. Quite possibly the birds