Our scientific arrangement introduces next the gull family, followed by a series of groups that seems to the layman most miscellaneous. The gulls are a world-wide family of sea birds, seen also near bodies of water in the interior of continents, especially northward, which live on fish and floating edibles. They are mostly glistening white, often marked with black about the head and wings, except the big brownish skuas that live by robbing other gulls of their catch and their nests of young. A very distinct group in the family are the smaller terns, whose slender forms, long wings, and graceful flight give them the suitable name of "sea swallows." Another distinct lot is that of the low-flying black "skimmers." All these birds normally breed on sandbanks near shore, laying four handsomely variegated eggs in a mere shallow of earth, but a good many nest in colonies on the margin of fresh-water lakes. The gulls serve well as scavengers, but are not good to eat.

Related to the gulls, but very different in appearance, are the small, dark-colored, quaint auks, guillemots and puffins of northern coasts, that look like miniature penguins, for they stand erect on two big feet. They are fishers, with great skill in swimming and diving, and breed in companies of thousands, sometimes, on the ledges of the sea-fronting cliffs of Labrador, northern Scotland, Alaska, and Arctic islands. The extinct "great auk" of the North Atlantic coasts was a giant of this race.

Passing the sand grouse of Africa and Russia, we come to the pigeons, represented in a bewildering variety of forms in every part of the world. The United States has several species—the common wood dove, or mourning dove, the extinct "wild pigeon," once here in millions, the banded pigeon of the Pacific Coast, and several kinds of ground doves in the southwest. The rock dove, which is the original of the domestic varieties, is still wild in Europe, together with several other species; and the Orient abounds in representatives of the family, some of them large and extremely handsome, especially in the division called fruit pigeons. To this family belonged that famous bird of the past, the "dodo" of Mauritius.

There follow two big groups, the cuckoos and plantain eaters, and the parrots, which together have the peculiarity of two toes in front and two behind, instead of the customary three toes in front and one, or perhaps none, behind; the woodpeckers have the same "yoke-toed" arrangement, but are distinct otherwise. The cuckoos are mainly Oriental and very varied, although all show the slender form, long tail, and long curved beak that we see in our two American species, the black-billed and yellow-billed; the most aberrant one in our country is the queer, lizard-catching road runner of southern California. None of the cuckoos seems a good nest maker. The nests of our common ones are loose platforms of twigs, and both species often drop eggs in each other's cradles; but they, in common with almost all the other cuckoos of the world, do at least incubate their eggs and care for the nestlings, instead of leaving that task to some foster parent, as does the similar cuckoo of Europe. The most extraordinary feature of this parasitic habit is the fact that the cuckoo often, if not always, first lays its egg in any convenient place, and then, taking it in its beak, carries it to another bird's nest and puts the egg into it. This accounts for the frequent finding of a cuckoo's egg in nests into which so large a bird could not have crept.

To record the fact that about 500 different kinds of parrots are catalogued will be a sufficient explanation of their dismissal with a few general remarks. The larger number and most striking examples—the great cockatoos for instance—belong to Australia and the Malayan islands, but the Indian region, Africa, and tropical America abound in parrots. Probably the northernmost of the whole family is our Carolina parakeet, which formerly ranged in summer even to the Great Lakes, but now is almost exterminated even from the great swamps of the Gulf Coast. Of the two kinds most often seen in cages—a custom that is almost prehistoric in antiquity—the gray parrot is African, and the green or green and yellow "Amazons" come from South America.

Parrots are gregarious, nest in holes in trees, although a few live in holes in the ground or among loose rocks, and feed on all sorts of vegetable productions, including some very hard fruits cracked in their powerful bills, as is the habit of the gorgeous macaws of Central and South America. The lories of Australia are provided with tongues brushlike at the tip, and besides eating seeds they lick the honey out of the blossoms of the eucalyptus and other flowering trees, and in so doing effect the cross-fertilization of these trees in a country which has no bees to do that service.

Passing the brilliant rollers of the Old World, and the motmots and little gemlike todies of the New, we come to the extensive tribe of kingfishers, of which our blue and white example is a very modest specimen—but the only one we have, while 150 other species are counted in the rest of the world, most of them in the Austro-Malayan region and in Africa. They vary immensely in size, colors, food and habits. A large section are not "fishers" at all, but dwell in wooded places, and subsist on insects caught on the wing, and on reptiles, mice, etc., like birds of prey. Few groups are so diversified and entertaining as this one. Related to them are the bee-eaters, hoopoes, hornbills and others that bring us to the owls, a suborder of which contains the great nightjar family to which our whippoorwills and nighthawks belong, with the swifts and humming birds as near relations. Then come the woodpeckers, much alike all over the world (but absent from Australia), followed by the gorgeous trogons of Mexico and some other tropical beauties.