That scavenger the herring gull may be just as lazy as it looks. Human civilization has done nicely by it. It can live off the “produce” of our dumps during the wintertime, when it would otherwise have to work for a living. When a gull is standing around on the beach looking as if it were doing nothing, and we ask why, imagining the same specific purposes we think we ourselves pursue, we might be disappointed. As likely as not, the gull is doing just that, nothing, and will fly off at some stimulus--hunger, another gull, a plane, a man, or a shadow. And yet it is the bird’s association with the seashore, its response to the currents of the air, to changes in tides and weather, to the sun’s appearance at dawn and the departing light of evening, that lies in its own sight. It is just possible that you cannot exaggerate the effect of light on the physiology and actions of a bird. At least it seems to be of primary importance in the cycles of migration. So in a herring gull’s cold eye is a receptiveness not so much qualified by intelligence or the lack of it, but inextricably, directly connected with the world of light. When birds and animals react to me, and why leave out any man or child, even if it is only in answer to an “escape mechanism,” I see a vision unexplored. One morning several hundred gulls, herring and blackback, were congregated far below and ahead of me as I walked along the cliff. As soon as I appeared on the edge, casting a shadow over the beach, they took wing, even though I was at least a quarter of a mile away, and they rose in one heavy flock and beat slowly away down the sands and the surf line. Not long afterwards I saw an Atlantic, or red-throated, loon swimming just offshore, tall necked, its head looking off and alert as though the bird, like a pilot in his house or a watcher at the masthead, was on a constant lookout. When it saw me it glanced wildly and ducked head first, over and down, slipping under the water. On the same day, a few miles further along, I saw two harbor seals of good size, swimming twenty or thirty feet outside the beach. First one dark head appeared above the water and then as I watched through field glasses from the cliff top two big dark eyes suddenly looked up at me, and the seal dove, followed by another one a few yards behind. The two swam through green rolling waters parallel to the beach, coming up every half minute or so, their swimming forms like shadows slipping through the sea. The harbor seals, though intelligent and appealing animals, have suffered great persecution by man and are much less numerous in Cape waters than they used to be, so that the sight of these two large specimens at home and roaming along the shore was a great pleasure to me, and above all I enjoyed having made some contact with them, as I did with the birds--the mutual life touched on, an electric communication made between one far pole and another.