Whalemen always watch these birds while they are wheeling around high in the air in graceful and rapid circles, for they know that as soon as they sight a whale blowing they start for him, and from their elevated position they can, of course, discern one at a much greater distance than the men in the boat I doubt if it be altogether the marine animals brought to the surface by the whale that they are after, for if the whale remains above the surface any length of time they always settle on his back and hunt parasites. One specimen was brought me by an Eskimo that he had killed on the back of an _Orca gladiator_; the esophagus was fairly crammed with _Laernodipodian crustaceans_, still alive, although the bird had been killed some hours; they looked to me like _Caprella phasma_ and _Cyamus ceti_. According to the Eskimo who killed it, the birds were picking something from the whale's back, I have often seen them dart down among a school of _Delphinapterous leucas_ and follow them as far as I could see. On one occasion a pair suddenly alighted astern of my boat and were not 3 feet from me at times; they followed directly in the wake of the boat, and seemed so intent on picking up food that they paid no attention whatever to us. They had probably mistaken the boat for a whale. In northeastern Greenland, Manniche (1910) saw them hunt flying insects on land; he also says: Some 20 analyses of stomachs proved that the phalaropes in the breeding season chiefly feed on small insects, principally gnats and larvae of these. The esophagus and stomachs of several birds killed were filled with larvae of gnats, which in vast multitudes live in the fresh-water ponds. In a few stomachs I also found fine indeterminable remnants of plants (Algae?). W. Leon Dawson (1923) describes their feeding habits at the Farallones, as follows: Three red phalaropes, all female I take it, although none of them in highest plumage, and one northern, also a female, just under "high," are pasturing at my feet in a brackish pool some 20 feet long, 10 feet wide, and 2 feet deep. The waters of the pool teem with a minute reddish crustacean (?) shaped like an ant, less than a thirty-second of an inch in length and incredibly nimble. The insects progress by leaps, and are visible only at the moment of arrival. Yet these birds gobble them up one at a time with unerring accuracy and with a rapidity which is nothing short of marvelous. The reds work habitually at the rate of five dabs per second, i. e., 300 a minute, while the northern, with a longer beak and a much daintier motion, works only half as fast. The following observation was made on a California beach by Roland C. Ross (1922):