Leucophaeus atricilla
Order Charadriiformes
Family Laridae
Subfamily Larinae
Adult.— Head black; back and wings bluish-gray; hind neck, tail, and under parts white; outer quill-feathers entirely black; bill and feet dark brownish-red.
Adult in autumn.— Similar, but head white, streaked on the sides and hind neck with dusky.
Immature.— Similar to winter adult, but upper parts brown, tail broadly tipped with black.
Nest, on the ground, of grass and seaweed.
Eggs, grayish or greenish, thickly spotted and scrawled with brown and purplish.
The Laughing Gull is a summer resident of New England and New York, breeding in a few stations from Metinic Green Island on the coast of Maine southward. The largest colony is on Muskeget Island, near Nantucket. In 1900 over a hundred pair were nesting here, and when the terns rose in a vast cloud and filled the air with their harsh din, the Gulls floating above them uttered cries like the laughter of a lunatic. During the summer months the black hood easily distinguishes the Laughing Gull from any other gull or tern that breeds on our coast. Bonaparte’s Gull, which is a spring and fall migrant along the coast, has in spring the same black hood, but in the fall both species lose it; they may always be distinguished by the outer wing-feathers which are black in the Laughing Gull, white with black tips in the Bonaparte’s Gull.
Hoffmann – A Guide to the Birds of New England and Eastern New York (1904)