And the I'm going to be. Welcome, Tis newscast, the podcast designed to help you fall asleep.

Find us on Snusscast.com and follow us on social media and wherever you listen to podcasts.

This episode is supported by our Patreon supporters and by Rocky Bluffs.

Tonight. We'll read another chapter from the book Bird Watching, published in

1901 by Edmund Sellis, titled Watching Gulls and Skew Us. If you enjoy this episode, please be sure to listen to

our Blackbirds episode and the Watching Birds from a Haystack episode from the series as well.

The author started as a conventional naturalist of his time, but Seleus developed a hatred of the common practice at the time of

killing animals for scientific study and was a pioneer of bird watching as a method of scientific study.

The author was a solitary man and was not well known in ornithological circles. He avoided both the company of ornithologists and reading

their observations so as to base his conclusions entirely on his own observations. Let's get cozy. Close your eyes. Relax your body into the softness of your bed.

Now, Now take a few deep breaths.

Gulls and skew us are best watched on some lonely island where they breed and thither we will now transfer ourselves.

They breed together in the same grounds,

and more than half of the whole island,

all that part where it is a peedy waste clothed with a thin brown

heather is now in early June their assembly ground and prospective nursery.

The goals are in much the greater numbers, and all of them here are of the black-backed species,

mostly the lesser of the two so named, but with a fair sprinkling of the greater black-backed also,

lying down and sweeping the distance with the looking glasses. For near they have risen and

float overhead in a glamorous cloud. One sees everywhere the bright white dotings of their breasts

Soft gleaming amidst the uniform brown of the heather.

They are not at all crowded,

...