The gannets showed themselves only now and then, but the brown pelicans were an every-day sight.  I had found them first on the beach at St. Augustine.  Here at Daytona they never alighted on the sand, and seldom in the water.  They were always flying up or down the beach, and, unless turned from their course by the presence of some suspicious object, they kept straight on just above the breakers, rising and falling with the waves; now appearing above them, and now out of sight in the trough of the sea.  Sometimes a single bird passed, but commonly they were in small flocks.  Once I saw seventeen together,—­a pretty long procession; for, whatever their number, they went always in Indian file.  Evidently some dreadful thing would happen if two pelicans should ever travel abreast.  It was partly this unusual order of march, I suspect, which gave such an air of preternatural gravity to their movements.  It was impossible to see even two of them go by without feeling almost as if I were in church.  First, both birds flew a rod or two with slow and stately flappings; then, as if at some preconcerted signal, both set their wings and scaled for about the same distance; then they resumed their wing strokes; and so on, till they passed out of sight.  I never heard them utter a sound, or saw them make a movement of any sort (I speak of what I saw at Daytona) except to fly straight on, one behind another.  If church ceremonials are still open to amendment, I would suggest, in no spirit of irreverence, that a study of pelican processionals would be certain to yield edifying results.  Nothing done in any cathedral could be more solemn.  Indeed, their solemnity was so great that I came at last to find it almost ridiculous; but that, of course, was only from a want of faith on the part of the beholder.  The birds, as I say, were brown pelicans.  Had they been of the other species, in churchly white and black, the ecclesiastical effect would perhaps have been heightened, though such a thing is hardly conceivable.

Some beautiful little gulls, peculiarly dainty in their appearance ("Bonaparte’s gulls,” they are called in books, but “surf gulls” would be a prettier and apter name), were also given to flying along the breakers, but in a manner very different from the pelicans’; as different, I may say, as the birds themselves.  They, too, moved steadily onward, north or south as the case might be, but fed as they went, dropping into the shallow water between the incoming waves, and rising again to escape the next breaker.  The action was characteristic and graceful, though often somewhat nervous and hurried.  I noticed that the birds commonly went by twos, but that may have been nothing more than a coincidence.  Beside these small surf gulls, never at all numerous, I usually saw a few terns, and now and then one or two rather large gulls, which, as well as I could make out, must have been the ring-billed.  It was a strange beach, I thought, where fish-hawks invariably outnumbered both gulls and terns.