Cape Ann this week

Some additional images from this week's day trip to Cape Ann, Massachusetts.

Common Eider (drake)

Hedrring Gull

Common Eider (1st winter drake)

Rocky Neck

Common Loon (Adult non-breeding)

And finally ... probably my favorite photo of the day ...ds

Herring Gull

Good birding!

Brigantine (Forsyth NWR)

I did a morning trip to Brigantine on Monday. Good numbers of dabblers, otherwise fairly quiet. Even so, a few hours of meditative birding always leaves me feeling fresh and renewed. Some samples from the day:

Plenty of dabblers in the canals and ponds, including American Black Ducks and Northern Shovelers ...

Northern Shoveler (hen)

American Black Duck and Northern Shoveler (hen)

American Black Duck

Northern Shoveler (hen)

 I enjoyed watching this Herring Gull repeatedly dropping this mollusk in an effort to break it open.

Herring Gull

Herring Gull dropping the mollusk

Herring Gull

Brant

Dunlin

Good Birding!!

More from Cape May

Cape May is known as a premier spot for Fall hawk migration. The viewing platform was crowded with observers. The great thing was, one did not have to visit the platform for many and regular hawk sightings, as for example ...

Cooper's Hawk

Sharp-shinned Hawk

A few more photographic samples of the day ...

American Goldfinch

American Coot

Double-crested Cormorant

Herring Gill

Boat-tailed Grackle

Boat-tailed Grackle

There were also butterflies flying - monarch, sulphurs, whites, Red Admiral, but only the Common Buckeye paused ...

Common Buckeye

Good Birding!

Black Guillemot and Herring Gull

The Black Guillemot is often a distant white and gray speck bobbing on the waves - or during breeding season - a black form with big white wing patches.

On our trip to the Maine coast (at Schoodic Point), we had a different view of the Black Guillemot when we saw one in breeding plumage was fishing close to the rocky shore ...

Black Guillemot

Black Guillemot

Black Guillemot

Common birds are often overlooked by birders and photographers. I noticed recently that my photos of the Herring Gull were rather paltry. So when the opportunities came in Maine, I took them ...

Herring Gull

Herring Gull

Herring Gull

 Good Birding!!

Two Common Gulls

It is very easy to overlook common birds and/or to ignore them when photographing and posting photographs. Here are two examples of common gulls, both photographed at Forsyth NWR (Brigantine) in November.

Ring-billed Gull (adult winter) ...

Ring-billed Gull (adult winter)

Ring-billed Gull (adult winter)

Herring Gull (adult winter) ...

Herring Gull (adult winter)

Olsen and Larsson: "Note coarse dark spotting on head and breast-sides, emphasizing whitish, evil-looking eyes." (emphasis added)

Herring Gull (adult winter)

Good Birding!!

The Herring Gull as a Symbol

Earlier this week, I posted on my blog a series of pictures of a Herring Gull bathing. It was a mature adult bird. It stepped into a pool, dunked its head and body in the water, splashed, then stepped out, stretching its wings and shaking water from its feathers.

I took the series of photographs along the Maine coast. The sleek gray and white plumage of this large gull melded with the matte gray and black of the rocks. The only color was in the yellow beak, and the scattered flecks of pale green lichen.

Sometime afterward, I found a rather odd association working through my mind, one that related the ablutions of this gull with those of Venus, or one of her attendants. The goddess pauses for a short bath in some hidden pool. She steps from the water carefully, droplets dampening the ground as they fall from long tresses or are shaken loose from stretched arms. I had stumbled upon the scene. Secretly and forbiddenly, I photographed the sleek and graceful goddess.

Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus” also worked through my mind. The goddess rises from the sea. She stands naked on a shell as two Zephyrs, personification of the winds, blow her toward the shore, even as the Herring Gull, often seen far from the shore, always comes to the shore.

Can the gull be a symbol of gracefulness or beauty? On the wing there is often sensuousness in a gull’s flight as it dips and whirls on invisible air currents. Aground, at rest, or in its bath, can the gull present neatness and dignity in demeanor? - self-possession and confidence? - the allure of beauty?

I am well aware that few people would juxtapose a Herring Gull with a forbidden glimpse of a naked goddess taking a moment for cleansing refreshment, much less with beauty or sensuousness.

The large gulls are more likely to evoke an opposite reaction, one of distaste and dislike. I will be reminded by many that gulls are noisy. They eat anything. They steal food from one another. They prey on the eggs and chicks of smaller seabirds. They chase fishing boats to grab up the offal. They swirl in masses over garbage dumps. When I sat on the rocks to watch the gulls, this was the sort of behavior I was looking for and expecting to photograph.

I was hoping that I would begin to acquire photographs which would be my imitation of a series of paintings by Jamie Wyeth which I had seen a few days before at the Farnsworth Museum in Rockport, Maine. Wyeth has spent a great deal of time on the coast and islands of Maine. His artist’s eye has led him beyond the usual observations of the New England seacoast where gulls are merely background - ubiquitous, but not always noticed - a soaring outline but not a deliberate subject. Wyeth, by contrast, has often drawn and painted the Herring Gull and he has observed it: “these gulls are no white doves, but nasty pugnacious contenders for their needs and desires.”

Most of us, when we project human perceptions and values onto birds, project those traits which embody the sweet or adorable - those traits which suggest innocence and perhaps even goodness. In a complete reversal of the usual, Wyeth employed the gulls to represent the dark side of human nature, the side we would prefer not to acknowledge. His series of paintings, “Seven Deadly Sins,” links gull behavior to human behavior in a way that is evident, dramatic ... and disturbing .

Sin is not something which is much heard of, or talked about, in our wider culture. Even in the narrow culture of the religious right, sin is pretty much confined to geography located below the belt. As recent news events demonstrate, these folk often lose (or loose) the belt, and when they have the misfortune of getting caught, they lament loudly and repent, confident that God will make them better (never wondering why God didn’t keep them from being bad in the first place).

They have harbored the deadly sin, Lust. What these poor unfortunates are oblivious to is that Lust is just one of the deadly sins of which they have been guilty. There are six more, and each, according to the theology which emerged in the Middle Ages, puts the immortal soul in danger of eternal damnation. Or if you prefer to keep things on an entirely humanistic level - each can totally screw things up for the individual, and all the rest of us.

In Greed, Wyeth paints a triumphant gull standing over the pile of ice cream and pie he has claimed from some picnicker, while other gulls stand mutely in the background. This Herring Gull is but a pale imitation of the corporate bonuses and collective greed that now have the rest of the economy not just looking on, but scrambling to gather scraps.

The mouth of a single gull is over stuffed with a fish in Wyeth’s painting of Gluttony, while supermarkets and national obesity contrast with soup lines and malnutrition.

Here is the complete list of the deadly seven: Anger, Greed, Envy, Gluttony, Pride, Sloth, and Lust. If you have ever watched gulls cleaning up a harbor or feeding in a municipal dump, you can readily imagine how they might be used to personify the ugly side of human nature.

Occasionally the gull emerges as a different kind of symbol. In the Netherlands, the gull, standing for freedom, is almost a national symbol. In Utah, The California Gull (a close relative of the Herring Gull) is the state bird. In 1848, it gained a reputation as a protector of crops. Swarms of crickets attacked pioneer food supplies. Reportedly, flocks of the birds arrived, settled in the half-ruined fields and gorged themselves on the attacking crickets. The voracious appetite of the gulls saved the settler's crops ... and lives.

But I admit that I have found no hint anywhere of the gull being associated with a goddess in her bath, or rising naked from the sea on a shell. That is solely the result of my mind taking its own free journey.

At least I know how the journey started. It began when I was looking for gull behavior which would confirm Wyeth’s using them in his series on the seven deadly sins. I did not find Wyeth in the live gulls on that particular day. Instead, I was intrigued by a sense of beauty hiding behind the ordinary and the mundane.

Birding does that to me when I slow it down enough to look - not just watch and count. Increasingly I find that makes for good birding.

Herring Gull

Following is a series of photos I took in late June on Schoodic Point in Maine. Thoughts about the gull will form this week's Reformer column (posted on Saturday), so please come back for some philosophical musings.

The Herring Gull - the Typical Gull

I love the New England coast, and in recent weeks I have had several occasions to wander sections of this coast, explore some of the inlets, and just watch as the tides breaks on the rugged rocks and cliffs. During most of this wandering, I was not deliberately looking for birds, with the result that I noticed some birds more than I otherwise might have.

Specifically, I noticed the Herring Gull, which is bound to make some birders may gag. The Herring Gull is so common. It is often a pest; it is noisy and pushy. It preys on the eggs and young of “good” birds. It eats garbage. It poops prodigiously on docks, sidewalks, signs, and any other object on which it may alight on or fly over. The Herring Gull is there - always - and need not be noted or paused over as the birder pursues the next bird sighting.

Yes, the Herring Gull is there, and that’s what I noticed. I saw it on a stone guard rail at a scenic parking spot, unconcerned about my car intruding on its space, its feathers ruffled only by the ocean breeze. I saw it hopping amount the tables of an outdoor restaurant in the early evening; the diners were gone and the waitstaff was cleaning up. So was the Herring Gull, looking for bits of food strewn on the grass. I saw the Herring Gull perched on a car top on a coastal mountain top.

Thirty miles from shore, in the open ocean, I saw a Herring Gull flying steadily and purposefully eastward toward the deeper waters of the Atlantic, and another flying in from those distant waters. And another, resting on the waters among the pelagic shearwaters which only come ashore to breed.

I watched a Herring Gull hover over a roadway with something in its beak, then drop that something onto the hard pavement - a mollusk of some type. It repeated the exercise, each time from a greater height, until the protective shell finally cracked and yielded its contents to the resourceful, and hungry, gull.

I saw a Herring Gull sleeping peacefully on a sunny rock, and a dozen of varying ages socializing on a sandbar, and several dozen following a lobster boat for whatever offal might be thrown on the waters, and another wading in the thick seaweed and mud just exposed by the ebbing tide, its feet sucked in by the semi-liquid ocean floor just as were those of the human hunter for crabs nearby.

I saw the Herring Gull everywhere along and near the coast. It is a proto-typical gull - the gull that is used as the model with which to compare and contrast other gulls. Other gulls are bigger than, smaller than, slimmer than, stockier than, lighter than, darker than, whiter than, more graceful than ... the Herring Gull.

The Herring Gull is a large gull, with pink legs, yellow bill, and a bright red spot on its lower mandible. It has a white head. It is white underneath and gray on the back. The primary wing feathers are black on the ends with white spots. While typical of gulls, it is not the most handsome of gulls; Dunne in his Essential Field Guide Companion calls it “gangly and angular” and concludes that “if any gull deserves to be called ugly, this one is it.”

The Herring Gull’s scientific name is Larus argentatus. Larus is from Latin for gull; argentatus means silvery, or plated with silver, hence one of its folk names - “Silver Gull.” It is also known as the “Harbor Gull,” for its prevalence in and around harbors, and the “Winter Gull” for the fact that it often appears in the winter. In southeastern Vermont and the Connecticut River valley it is one of our three “winter gulls,” joining company with the smaller Ring-billed Gull and the larger Greater Black-backed Gull. (Other rarer gulls can sometimes be found in the Connecticut River valley during winter, but these are the three most common.)

Along the New England coast, the Herring Gull is found year-round. Its breeding range generally begins on the off-shore islands and extends northward to the Arctic. In winter it vacates the far north, wintering from Newfoundland southward along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, and sometimes to Mexico and the West Indies. It takes three to four years for a Herring Gull to mature and begin breeding; young birds may stay on the wintering range throughout the year and may wander much further than adults.

Herring Gulls are today the most common gull in the east. Commonalty often leads to disinterest and even contempt. But a hundred years ago, the bird was in danger. Their numbers had been drastically reduced by eggers, and the feather trade.

Audubon described a visit in 1833 to White Head Island at the entrance to the Bay of Fundy. He was surprised to find Herring Gulls nesting in trees. The island’s owner explained that his sons and fishermen collected most of the eggs for use in winter. The gulls gradually began to put their nests in trees in the thickest island woods. Only the younger gulls were still nesting on the ground. The depredation to the gulls was so great, that the owner prohibited strangers from robbing the nests and only permitted select persons, such as Audubon and his party, to shoot the gulls. “I daresay,” quoted Audubon, “you will not commit any greater havoc among them than is necessary, and to that you are welcome.”

But this island owner was an exception in his restrictions. Gathering eggs for food, and killing the birds for the hat-feather trade (Herring Gulls and many other species), was so great during the nineteenth century that numbers were drastically reduced, endangering the survival of some species, and beginning to push the Herring Gull to that point. Fortunately, in the early twentieth century protections were instituted and the gull populations began to recover.

Herring Gulls recovery has been helped by its adaptability. They will eat anything. When natural food sources have been depleted, they have turned, instead, to offal, garbage and sewage. Forbush described their food adaptations: “It gathers in flocks in harbors and wherever fish are dressed or thrown away, at canning factories, fish-freezers or fish-wharves, and quickly devours all offal or fish-waste thrown into the water. It flocks in thousands where sewage is discharged .... Wherever fish, killed in thousands by disease, frost or other causes, are cast up in countless multitudes upon the shore to poison the air with the offensive effluvia of decay, there the gulls gather and in an astonishingly short time succeed in abating the nuisance.”

Landfills and garbage dumps are favorite gathering places for gulls where, in spite of their best efforts, they are unable to devour the tons of human generated garbage. Polite society does not like to be reminded of its garbage and filth, and looks down on those who clean up after the waste. Herring Gulls are enthusiastic omnivores and indiscriminate garbage lovers, thus reaping prejudice by the garbage producers.

On the New England coast, and in winter on many inland waters, Herring Gulls are everywhere. When I am not too busy, I notice them. Good birding!