Loomis on California Water Birds

Recen! 'leralre.LApril greediness the birds swallow many of the seeds.Mr. Webber experimented with a captive Mockingbird and found that the seeds were readily swallowed with the fruit and were evacuated in from fifteen minutes to an hour in good condition for germination.During about four hours the bird ate and evacuated fifty-one seeds.A nmnber of these were planted, and a tair proportion grew into healthy young plants.The Mockingbird is also responsible for a third method of dissemination.It will readily be seen that, as the bird feeds, many of the seeds drop directly down.Some of them fall into the crown of upturned leaves immediately beneath the fruit-stalk and stick there.After the cluster has ripened all its fruit, a lateral branch develops and shoots up beside the fruit-stalk, bearing a new crown of leaves and thus prolonging the trunk, while the old leaves reflex and point doxvnwards.With the reflexion of these leaves, the seeds, now dry, roll or slide down the inclined plane thns formed and are shot out to a safe distance from the parent plant.Those seeds which originally fall between the leaves of the crown naturally reach the groumt in the same way by the reflexed blades of the previous leaf-cluster.This yucca has in the larva of a moth another aid to dissemination, but that is a story for the entomologist.--F.H. A. Loomis on California Water Birds.--Thepresent paper gives the results of Mr. Loomis's observations made off Monterey, California, from Dec. ;x, ;89, to Jan. ;3, I895-Forty-three species are formally noticed, of which xz are Gulls of the genus I, arts--probably a number not exceeded on any coast, at this or any other season.The annotations relate generally to the manner of occurrence of the various species.but in several cases include descriptions of little-knovn phases of plnmage.The Ancient Murrelet (Syniloebor,amts antz'/mts) is reported as common, wintering in considerable nnmbers on the coast of California, although previously recorded as a California bird, as Mr. Loomis observes, apparently from only a single specimen taken off Monterey in January, ;87.Mr. Loomis also reports the Mev Gull (Larus cactus) as apparently common on the California coast in winter, although its distribntion in the second edition of rheA.O. U.' Check-List' is stated to be "Europe and Asia; accidental in Labrador?."Mr. Loomis calls attention, however, to a former record for California by Mr. Henshaw (Auk, II, p. 232 ).Prec,eding the annotated list (pp.2-4) Mr. Loomis presents and discusses the general }acts of migration as observed in respect to the water birds of the California coast in winter.He brings into special proninence the evidence of a southward migration in winter to breeding grounds in the southern hemisphere of certain species of Shearwaters, and California Water Birds, No. II.Vicinity of Monterey in Midwinter.By

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