I’d know you anywhere

June 27, 2024 / scourchesne / 2 Comments

I was working in the yard a lot the past few days, and all the pollen and dust I kicked up seems to have aggravated one of my tonsils, that now rolls in its pocket like a small stone every time I swallow. This got me to thinking about 1K9. Back in May, we were attempting to catch and band her mate, and we noticed that 1K9 herself had a fish hook lodged in her mouth, and a streamer of monofilament trailing behind her. We were able to trap her and get a closer look. The hook was huge and thick and durable. It had stabbed into the side of her glottis–the opening to her airway–and the tissue had thickened around the hook, walling it off but also making her airway itself raised and swollen. Though we had many varieties of pliers and other tools, we’d have needed a bolt cutter to break it. I cut the monofilament away, and that was all we could really do for her. Every time she closes her beak, the top of the hook pokes into the roof of her mouth, and I imagine the whole thing is sore and tender and there’s nothing we can do.

1K9 with hook stuck in her mouth. Photo by ME Everett

I hate these situations. Most of the time, we are able to catch gulls afflicted in such ways and free them. We’ve removed yards and yards worth of monofilament from around wings, legs, and beaks. Sometimes we get it done early enough that there’s no lasting damage. Other times we don’t. 1K9’s plight has been bothering me all month. Gulls live long, often hard lives, and they can get themselves into serious trouble because of their willingness to engage with humans, who, by malice or indifference or carelessness, can end a gull’s life, or at least make it quite miserable.

I started thinking about all the gulls we know as individuals because of their bands, but also all the unbanded gulls that are nonetheless marked in some way. We’ve seen a lot of foot trouble among the gulls of Appledore, and often those injuries are distinctive. John Makowsky shared this photo of a gull that has been a long time visitor to his lobster boat, identifiable by her split web.

Splitweb on the boat. photo by John Makowsky

We have assembled quite a gallery of photos of hurt, beat up feet in the gulls. Sometimes we can tell what happened, but usually it’s a mystery. In the first photo below, the gull had a chunk of some sort of fiberglass or other material embedded in the webbing. We felt glad to be able to work it free without much blood at all, so the bird would not be feeling this dreadful splinter at every step anymore.

The bands we place on the birds have an extensive safety record of not causing trouble for the birds. Still, I find myself wishing I could just recognize them by sight, and spare them the trouble of being caught for band placement. I wish we had the skills John Makowsky does, and especially his good fortune of getting to know specific gulls on his boat by their behavior, body language, and routines. How extraordinary it would be to know your gull relations in this way, and not have to rely on something so unsubtle as a band, or the distinctive rips and tears life metes out to such a long-lived creature.

We’ll be back out on Appledore next month to band chicks, with their tender little feet and their untested wings. Most of them won’t make it to adulthood, and the grizzled, hardscrabble attitudes of their parents, but some few will. I am especially hoping that 1K9 and her mate have managed to rear their babies successfully, and that soon she can head off island and have some rest, despite that infernal fish hook aching away in her poor mouth.

Banding, like all relationships, is about compromise

May 31, 2024 / scourchesne / Leave a comment

A bit later than we might like, but we made it out to Appledore this May for adult banding. (It occurs to me that the phrase “adult banding” conjures something rather more salacious than it is. Also, its July corollary “chick banding” has its own alternate connotations. Anyway…)

This year, we were attempting to balance three, only somewhat overlapping, research aims. The purposes were bolted together in a janky vehicle we called our banding crew. First, there was the standard fare of banding new birds, and traversing the entire island to locate and map where all the previously banded birds are nesting, and with whom. Even those two goals are at cross purposes–we can’t do whole island resighting while banding. So, we try to divvy up the days, and spend part of our time banding, and part resighting.

In addition to those baseline goals, we had two different research protocols adhering to us. Dr. Kristen Covino continues her work on diet analysis via isotopes in feathers. For this project, we need to capture both mates in a pair and sample them both. This runs somewhat cross-grain to the goal of banding new birds; so many banded birds on Appledore have unbanded mates, so getting matched sets of samples means we end up recapturing a lot of already banded birds.

We also had two graduate students, Melba Torres Sosa, and Jonathan Dain, from the lab of Dr. Nichola Hill along with us. Nichola’s lab works on avian flu, and they were looking to get oral and cloacal swabs, fecal samples, and a fair amount of blood from each bird. With a sufficient volume of blood, they can look not only at whether the birds are positive or negative for high pathogenicity avian flu (HPAI, aka H5N1 flu), but also at prior exposure via the presence of antibodies. With enough blood, they can also get a detailed look at the particular genetic nature of the strain of flu the birds were exposed to. The amount of blood is small overall in terms of the effect on the birds, and it’s quite safe to take, but it’s not easy to get, and the process of divvying up the blood and other samples into all sorts of different science tubes takes time. So, even though this project did not require us to recapture already banded birds like Kristen’s did, it did increase our processing time and reduce the overall number of birds we were able to catch and band.

These compromises are standard in field science. We have to balance one thing against the other, and try our best to get each team what they need. We also have to talk through “need” versus “want” and what the absolute minimums are for samples, and dabble at the edge of the mire called statistical significance and such like.

We did do our best, though what most often gets compromised is our team’s psychological and emotional well-being. There are basically no breaks in our day besides meals, and even after the field work portion is done, the sample processing and data entry extend into the night-time hours. By the end of a 4-5 day stint, most of us are thoroughly thrashed.

It’s hard to explain what is so deeply exhausting about it all, if you’ve never done work like this. Some of it is ordinary, physical tiredness from lugging buckets of heavy gear around a rocky island all day under the hot sun. But a lot of it is particular and peculiar to gull work: the constant screeching, swooping, and threats of violence from above, and the occasional actual strikes to our (helmeted) heads, sets all our teeth on edge. The birds are scared the entire time we are handling them, and knowing you’re scaring a creature you love grinds you down when you do it for days on end. For some of us, being in the constant company of other people makes us feel like the insulation on the wiring of our brains has come off and things are sparking and shorting out in there.

I’ve been back on the mainland for several days now, slowly recovering. I think about the birds we banded, adjusting to the new accessories affixed to their legs. It strikes me as fitting that my own bodily topography is altered now too. The birds bite–even through our gloves, through the bags we place them in to quiet them– and my hands and wrists are bruised and furrowed. Red ant bites along my flank rose up like new formed volcanic islands. A scar from last year in the shape of a spear-tip marks my skinning by the delicate farthest tip of a gull beak. The new wounds are still raised and red, but this old one is pure white. It reminds me of the rocky edge of Appledore, where bolts of white shoot through the otherwise gray ground. That scar on my right hand joins a catalog of other intrusions: the thin, clear line where a feral cat sliced my wrist years ago; the faint, ragged one where I snagged myself on a rusty gate on a dairy farm. I’m waiting to see if the wound still healing from this year’s banding will seal up and be forgotten, or leave a permanent record.

We move now into a waiting pattern. Nichola’s team will process their samples and let us know what they find in terms of virus and past viral exposure. If this year is a bad one for HPAI, we expect to see Appledore gulls start dying soon, like they did in 2022. Across the region, signs have been pointing worryingly toward another year like that, after 2023’s reprieve. I dread it, frankly. We took extra precautions this year, gloving up, disinfecting our shoes between sections of the colony, breathing heavily through our KN95s as we scrambled and teetering over the rocks with all our gear. In addition to protecting ourselves, we at least wanted to try to avoid being the things that track virus from bird to bird, even if we can’t prevent a natural outbreak, however it arrives on the island. Both Kristen’s and Nichola’s teams are still out there, following up on the nests and nestlings of the adults we banded and sampled. We hope they encounter nothing at all unusual.

PS: Thank you to everyone who helped with banding this year, in addition to the researchers listed above. Specifically, faculty and TA on the Shoals Marine Lab’s Field Ornithology course, Dr. Shailee Shah and Maddie Ellms, respectively, pitched in. Dean Russell, a journalist, came along for the ride and helped out too. Especial thanks to the people who volunteer their time/use vacation time/sacrifice paid work time back home in order to run this, namely Sean Mattie and Dylan Titmuss. We couldn’t, and wouldn’t want to, do this without you as partners.

Wistful, watching, waiting, wondering

October 16, 2023 / scourchesne / 2 Comments

Our ragtag, oddball, Gulls of Appledore Research Group takes something of an unconventional approach to studying our bird friends. We are not paid to do this work, and it’s not tied to any academic lab with a mandate to churn out papers on the subject. While this leads to a certain precarity (of funding, in particular), it also yields us freedom to wonder. We take more of a natural historian’s perspective, as a result, and make no attempts to draw statistics-based conclusions about aggregates or populations. Our time among the gulls has shown us that they are individuals in just such a way as we humans are. Most of our team is trained in a blend of sciences and humanities, and we bring to the project a storyteller’s eye for plot lines, emotional registers, aesthetics.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how often the little window we get into a gull’s life functions like a writing prompt. You get a stem of a story, a glimpse of something, a moment, and then you need to run with it, constructing an imaginative realm from the thinnest strand of a beginning.

When Friend of Gulls John Makowsky wrote to me earlier this summer asking “Where are all the adult Black-Backeds?” I found myself mulling the question and spinning out all manner of possible tales. The fact is, some, or most, of these questions are not answerable, but I sure do love to wonder about it.

John sent some photos of the one day in June when several Great Black-Backed Gulls turned up near his lobster boat. But that sight was, in most years, a regular occurrence, not a once-a-summer thing.

The single day when a whole group of GBBG turned up around John’s boat (as well as some shearwaters).

John was seeing his good friend Red Eye, and her mate, Hero, all summer, as well as some younger Black-Backeds. But he was accustomed to larger groups of the adults turning up together, and it just wasn’t happening this summer. So, where were they?

I have no satisfying answers to that. I know that some of the gulls that visit John’s boat out in the Gulf of Maine are Appledore breeders, but many probably are not, and come from other islands, or even are taking the whole year off from breeding and are just bumming around all summer. So it’s hard to say what might be going on here. It could be that there are just fewer gulls around–we know their populations continue to decline, and just on Appledore, we did lose a couple dozen adults to avian flu last year. The broader losses across the Northeast must have been much greater. It also could be that the gulls were shifting their activities elsewhere, and had found some other food sources. It could be both things at once: declining gull populations mean more options for the remaining gulls in terms of places to go to eat. Who knows?

Red Eye reliably came all summer though, and brought her mate along. Now that fall is here, her mate has gone off someplace else. This is common in gulls: they work in intense partnership all summer to raise their young, but then, once the babies are fledged (or die), the two often go their separate ways for the winter. Often they will meet up again in spring and stick with the same mate for many years in this pattern. Often, they will have found someone new when April rolls around. I was reading a paper about another species of gull, the Black-legged Kittiwake, where researchers found that these divorces are more common in pairs that fail to raise any babies to fledging. (My favorite line from the write-up of this study: “Each bird was subjected to a personality test to determine their level of bravery, which included observing their reaction to a blue plastic penguin toy.”) Some of our work with the gulls on Appledore (Dr. Kristen Covino’s, especially) has been looking at these very things–individual personalities, compatibility, success in raising youngsters. The same sorts of things we wonder about in human couplings, of course.

Red Eye and Hero on John’s boat. Can you tell who’s who?

I wonder where Hero is now. I wonder where all the gulls of Appledore are now that the island is emptied out of them. We get sightings of so many of our banded birds from you all, but many of our banded birds are never seen off island, or outside of summer. I wonder about them. I wonder about the persistent gaps in our knowledge even in birds that are seen and reported, but only intermittently, or only in certain seasons. I love the gulls that turn up predictably, all year, in the same spot, like Red Eye, and I love the ones that disappear and keep their secrets.

End of another go-round

September 7, 2023 / scourchesne / Leave a comment

Traveling around, running errands, I now see many young-of-the-year gulls still trailing around after their parents, in parking lots, by the river, at the beach. Appledore will be pretty well abandoned by the gulls very soon. Our banding team finished hassling them back in July. We were focused, this season, mostly on getting blood samples and swabs to test the fledglings for avian flu. We had help in this endeavor from Jonathan Dein, who works in Nichola Hill’s lab at UMass-Boston. Jonathan was with us in the field, keeping straight about a gajillion different samples from multiple different birds at once. In the evenings, he headed into the lab to spin down the bloods and siphon off segments of it for later analysis.

Our crew at our extremely picturesque workspace.

We also had some extraordinary, early career environmental conservation professionals from Mass Audubon help us in our efforts:

The Mass Audubon Climate Corps and Environmental Fellows (photo by Aisha Farley)

Fana Scott takes an oral swab (photo by Taylor Lo)

We had mercifully little death and loss among the gulls this summer; it seems that the colony was mostly spared the ravages of flu. Nichola’s team have all their samples nestled cozily into university freezers.

Now, the newest gulls are off in the world, some bearing new bands. Keep an eye out for them, won’t you?

Dark-eyed island prophet, of what wonders will you speak? (photo by Dylan Titmuss)

Cautious optimism as high summer approaches

June 27, 2023 / scourchesne / Leave a comment

Clad in our various PPE, we swab a gull for HPAI. (photo by Dylan Titmuss)

Last month, we did our usual stint banding adult Great Black-backed Gulls, with one important addition: sampling for Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI). We partnered with virologist Dr. Nichola Hill at UMass-Boston to get her team a pretty impressive number of oral and cloacal swabs, as well as blood samples. It took substantial effort on the part of our little team, and we were clad in some extra PPE for our own defense against the virus, but we got to our hoped-for minimum of fifty birds sampled. Off they went, trundling away to UMB in “Joyce,” the tubby, blue, ultra-cold dry shipper that Nichola loaned us for the purpose.

Joyce on her way home, with a belly full of deep frozen samples.

Since then, the samples have been run, and not a single bird tested positive for HPAI. That’s great news for the birds, though we were not surprised; last year, the illness and death didn’t start until June, so we figured we were unlikely to turn up any positive birds as early as May this year. Since we got back to the mainland, we’ve been waiting anxiously to see if birds would begin taking sick or dying, but thus far, no sign of an outbreak. We’ve got our fingers crossed that maybe the colony will escape the terrible destruction the disease wrought last year.

In July, we will head out again for chick sampling. Our partnership with Nichola continues, and we will be getting her team both swabs and serum samples to see if any of the chicks are carrying antibodies to HPAI in their systems. Ultimately, we hope that wild birds can build up immunity to the disease, but it’s not clear yet how often birds recover, how long protective antibodies persist in their systems, or how both disease and immunity might travel within or between gull families. Hopefully, by continuing to work with Nichola, we can start to answer some of those questions.

Finally, reader Richard Seyfried wrote in a while back asking about the prospect of immunizing wild birds against HPAI. It’s not a crazy idea, and in fact, biologists working with critically endangered California Condors got permission to vaccinate the birds when the disease began killing them in alarming numbers. Things are different in species like gulls; the population is vastly larger and dispersed over a huge area. Vaccination can protect individual animal, and often are used that way in populations as tiny and closely monitored as the condors. In general, vaccines work best on a population scale, when “herd immunity” levels can be attained. There is no way we could ever vaccinate anywhere near enough gulls to get to that population level impact. Not to mention that the vaccine is not licensed for such use. So, all we can do is wait, hope, and practice good biosecurity when in the colony–wearing gloves and masks, and disinfecting our hands and tools often.

We’ll have more for you in July about how our chick banding efforts go, and in the interim, I’ll try and drop in a couple posts about the strange and wonderful things we encounter with all our five senses when out banding. I can say that the smells and tastes, at least, are a real mixed bag.

The view east, from the ridge above Siren’s Cove.

Artist feature: The scientific illustration of Ayane Garrison

May 18, 2023May 24, 2023 / scourchesne / Leave a comment

As we prepare to head out to Appledore for a week of banding and sampling, I have gulls even extra more than usual on my mind. I have been walking the island in my mind, wondering which our old friends will be back to nest this year, and hoping they ride out this year’s flu season alright.

Given all this gull imagery running through my brain, it seems a fitting time to share with you the remarkable work of an artist and scientist I met last year, named Ayane Garrison. Ayane and I got a chance to chat about gulls, gull communication, and gull anatomy for a project they were working on for a class. I got to take a look at their illustration portfolio too, and was truly dazzled by it (I tried to buy one of the pieces, but the original was not available, so I am luckily getting a print in the mail soon, to my delight!)

Follow Ayane on Instagram @ayaa_arts for more of their art.

Here’s Ayane in their own words, and then, the work itself. Enjoy! (note: it may take a little time for the PDFs to fully load for you, but your patience will be richly rewarded.)

“Hello! My name is Ayane (pronounced ah-yah-neh) Garrison and my pronouns are they/them/theirs. I am a student at Vassar College (class of 2024) where I’m majoring in biology and minoring in Japanese. I’m passionate about science communication and accessibility as well as scientific illustration. I also love gulls! I am thrilled and honored to be featured on the Gulls of Appledore blog!”

saltglandinfographic Download

garrison_ayane_scientific_illustration_2022-11-25-2-2 Download

This last one is actually an animation of how the syrinx works, but I am too cheap to upgrade my wordpress account to let me include video.

Low vibes, high path

April 3, 2023April 3, 2023 / scourchesne / 2 Comments

This winter, lobsterman and friend-of-gulls, John Makowsky wrote to me to say he’d perceived a drop in the number of great black-backed gulls around his boat. There were still plenty of herring gulls, and his particular favorite black-backed, Red Eye, and her mate Hero, were still turning up, but the overall count of GBBG just seemed depressed.

I heard from a few birders and gull enthusiasts that they were seeing a similar pattern at various coastal spots. Just…a vibe of missing GBBG. Last year’s outbreak of HPAI (high pathogenicity avian influenza) hit the black-backeds particularly hard, and I don’t think it’s impossible that it made a perceptible dent in their population.

Avian flu is on the minds of everyone who works in seabird colonies, as we get closer to the field season. In February, I was leading a field trip along the Merrimack River, and a family of participants found a dead, banded herring gull in the wrack line. It was not an Appledore gull, but sported the white on red, field readable band of John Anderson’s team up on Great Duck Island in Maine.

I wrote to John about the bird, and he wrote back, saying “One of ours, yes, alas, banded as an adult on Great Duck on 6/16/2020. any possible causes of mortality? we are super nervous about HPAI.” There were no outward signs of cause of death (there often are not), and I also wondered and worried about flu.

John and I commiserated about the state of things, and about our plans to band gulls this summer, and how to assess the risks involved.

The federal Bird Banding Lab sent out a memo to all banders in advance of the season advising us on the situation, and how we might elect to mitigate the risks to both humans and birds. They included this graphic to help visualize the various measures a banding team might elect to take. The most effective control is, of course, to not band at all. This is what we decided to do last year, when we canceled our July trip to band fledglings. Gulls are in the highly susceptible category, so we need to be much more cautious than our colleagues who are banding low susceptibility groups like songbirds.

As we plan our summer banding, we find ourselves settling in somewhere in the middle of this hierarchy of most to least effective mitigation measures: we got our flu shots, and have bought ourselves a whole bunch of PPE–disposable gowns, masks, gloves–and we also plan to disinfect our equipment regularly to avoid spreading the disease from bird to bird.

The type of trapping we use does not aggregate the birds together; we trap one bird at a time using wire boxes. This set up means the birds are not kept squeezed together like they are in group trapping. Still, we are concerned that we might carry the virus from bird to bird on our persons, shoes, equipment, and we will strive to limit that, even though it will slow our operation somewhat.

Finally, we are coordinating with regional virologists who have been tracking the disease in birds and seals and other wildlife. We will facilitate viral sampling of the colony this summer as best we can. If we are going to band at all, we want to be as careful as possible, and also maximize the information and knowledge of patterns of disease spread, between and within colonies. You can see from one of their data tables that HPAI swept over colonies from far up in Maine all the way to Massachusetts. And it didn’t stop there either.

So, that’s our plan currently, but we remain open to changing it as we learn more. We love the gulls so much, and we know we already stress them out with our disruptions and scientific harassment. The last thing we want to do is be responsible for further spreading a deadly disease while they are in the middle of the hard work of incubating eggs and raising babies.

Send all the positive vibes you can to the gulls, and we will keep you posted on what we learn about HPAI as we learn it.

Plum Island gull goings-on

December 8, 2022 / scourchesne / 2 Comments

It’s always been a half-truth, calling “the gulls of Appledore” by that name. Appledore is their summer home, singles bar, nursery for the young. But by September, they’re basically all gone, off to wherever they go. Sometimes we know very well where, other times not at all.

Plum Island in Massachusetts is a big long barrier island encompassing chunks of multiple towns, and also the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge. At the far southern tip of the island is a bit of Commonwealth land: Sandy Point State Reservation. It’s down that way that we lay our first scene.

Map of Plum Island (via Historic Ipswich)

Dan Prima, frequent sighter of gulls, sent an email this week with the subject line “Showdown at Bar Head.” I opened the missive expecting news of a brief tiff between gulls, and maybe a photo. Most Famous Gull of Appledore, 2E2, lives on the southern section of Plum Island, down by a spot called Bar Head.

Dan described and photographed a scene that startled me, and left me feeling a bit uneasy about 2E2’s general welfare.

“So I was at Lot 7 on the Refuge scanning the ocean when I saw two Great Black-Backed Gulls squabbling on the water….at first I thought it was a food thing. But when I watched in the scope for several minutes, I could see this was no food discussion. This was a full fledged street fight! After watching for 10 minutes, I went to video.

The gulls finally separated, and I checked them real quick. One was 2E2! Of course, I went down the beach to check on him….couple photos show him a little beat up but he seemed to walk it off.

Wondering if this other gull was challenging him for his mantle as top gull of the south end of the refuge.”

The photos alone give a sense of the protracted and violent struggle. In one frame, one gull bites the other’s head. In another, a beak clamps the leading edge of a wing. One bird is dragged backward, webbed feet pitched up in the air. They roll across the sand and the surf advances and recedes around them repeatedly as they remain literally at each other’s throats.

2E2 is a generalist, and will feed on anything from seal carcasses to clams to unattended picnics. As Dan says, this battle was not clearly about food or any obvious cause at all. We don’t usually see fights this severe, even on the breeding colony. The physical risk of engaging in beak to beak combat generally means the gulls avoid it and settle their differences with displays and vocalizations. Whatever happened between these two could not be settled with words, evidently. I wonder about Dan’s speculation–2E2 is now at least twenty years old, and could be quite a bit older. Could he be vulnerable to challenge over…what? A particular bit of beach? The birds generally are not all that territorial off the colony, at least when there’s no food at stake.

It’s a weird little mystery, and the mysteries mounted when another of our gull enthusiasts, Kat Couree, wrote me this week to report another strange behavior regarding 2E2:

“Just sharing that I have heard about 2E2 twice in a few days exhibiting some interesting behavior ..maybe normal but nothing I have seen though I am not at lot 7 every day. Apparently he came down on a person in a school group and swiped a sandwich from her hand..then flew off but didn’t eat it and came back to the group again.

I have never seen him go near people at all like other gulls in all the times I have been there. He usually stays off on the edges of everything.”

I agree with Kat; 2E2’s personality tends toward diffidence. He’s not usually the kleptoparasite kind, and when he does eat people food, he snags it only when some unsuspecting person has left it unattended. On Appledore, he’s not the most vehement nest defender. He has a generally easy-going demeanor and is neither particularly alarmed by people, nor all that comfortable approaching them.

Could it be that 2E2 is not doing well in some way? Maybe it’s just a strange/bad week for him. I know 2E2 can’t live forever, but I wish he would, and these reports of perturbations in his usual flow have me a bit worried, I confess.

My worries aside, this is the great joy of our long term banding: intimate knowledge of individual gulls; their families and friends and frenemies; their food preferences and personalities.

I also am deeply grateful to all the other folks who devote time to gull watching on Plum Island and elsewhere, helping us build up this picture. Some of these folks go beyond gull watching to gull rescue. Kat has worked to save sick and injured gulls in the past, and she’s not alone. Rounding out the gull news trifecta this week, I also had an email from Mike Paige, who has proposed, along with Kat, starting up a local gull rescue that, to my utter delight, they want to call “Wicked PISR” (as in “Plum Island Seagull Rescue”). Mike has seen gulls get into all manner of trouble, generally due, in some way, to human interference. He wrote:

“A few weeks ago I was at Sandy Point. Some woman was fishing. A gull grabbed her bait and got snagged. Luckily I was there. I was able to grab the gull because it was still on her line, cut the line free and carried the gull back to my space on the beach where a friend was. The hook went through the beak but not the tongue, looked like just beak cheek. I had my friend hold the gull. I went back to my car where I have a toolkit. Got the wire cutters. I was able to cut the barb off and the hook fell free, My friend let go of it and it flew away. There’s a success for you. The gull must have pecked and bit my hands 50 times. I had to stick something in its mouth so it couldn’t bite me and so I could get at the hook. I bought my friend and I the smallest ever pair of bolt cutters so we can cut fish hooks. Fish hooks for surf casting really should only be made out of iron so they’ll rust out of creatures’ mouths and fall away. No more stainless fish hooks. I still chuckle when I think how mad that gull was at me.”

In a fortuitous convergence, I now find myself in a better-than-ever position to help our gulls throughout their annual and life cycles: I have a new job as a Program Ornithologist at Mass Audubon, based at the Joppa Flats Education Center, just down the road from Plum Island. I get to help out leading bird outings to the Refuge and other local spots, and visiting with Plum Island based gulls is a real perk of the job. I hope I can also help facilitate Wicked PISR as they get off the ground, so to speak.

If we hear more about 2E2, whether more bizarre or untoward interactions, or just that he’s back to his normal self, you will, of course, be the first to know. In the meantime, keep him in your prayers, if you’re the praying kind, or just send him some good vibes, on the vibe radio frequency gulls usually tune in to.

Red Eye of Isles of Shoals

August 19, 2022August 19, 2022 / scourchesne / 1 Comment

Back in June, I got the opportunity to give a joint public presentation on gulls through my dear friend, Sarah Kern, who coordinates education programs for the Forest Society here in New Hampshire. My co-presenter was lobsterman and author John Makowsky. John wrote a book called “Red Eye of Isles of Shoals” about the connection between him and a Great Black-Backed Gull he calls Red Eye. Their story went big when Red Eye suffered an ailment and needed care. She made a full recovery and returned to life at sea, and on the bow of John’s F/V Intrepid.

This summer, when highly pathogenic avian flu (HPAI) tore through the continent, the gulls of Appledore suffered mightily. Dozens of birds died, presumably of the disease, and I became worried about Red Eye too. Red Eye is not banded, but we presume she breeds on Appledore. In summer, John reports that she heads off toward Shoals after she grabs breakfast on his boat. Given that Appledore hosts the vast majority of gulls breeding in the Isles, she’s probably a gull of Appledore. In any case, we consider her an honorary one.

I wrote to John back in July to see if Red Eye was faring well during the avian flu outbreak. He sent back a note and pictures that delighted me:

“So sorry to hear about the gulls on the island. RedEye seems good — meeting me every day.
Usually she seems to only want fish bellies and small bites then leaving I assume to feed her young.
Her mate Hero then sometimes arrives. I think he does a good job as a stay at home Dad. He is not too quick at grabbing the fish I toss him and usually seems surprised when a herring gull gets it first.

My last two trips I was surprised to see both RedEye and Hero come on board together. Is it possible that their young are old enough to be left alone? I did watch RedEye head back after a while and Hero stayed longer before leaving too.”

Red Eye the gull strides across the bow of a lobster boat toward a severed fish head that seems to be staring directly into the camera lens. — A fish head that seems to convey a deep sense of foreboding at Red Eye’s approach.

Red Eye the gull grips the severed fish head in her bill. — It went exactly as badly as the fish head feared.

In answer to John’s question, yes, at that point in the year, it was possible that the youngsters could be left alone for stretches while both parents went out for a date together. Near fledglings on the colony are often just hanging out in groups while their parents are away foraging. These groups of youngsters are akin to human teenagers who travel in bands and don’t have to be watched as closely as the chicks do when they’re younger and more vulnerable.

As the breeding season on the Isles of Shoals ends, and the avian flu outbreak fades, we are hoping all gulls can enjoy a bit of downtime, and we wish them all the fish heads and bellies and varied foods they love. May the chips rise to meet you, gull friends. See you on island next year, we hope, healthy and hale.

Asking this gull, “cat got your tongue?”

August 5, 2022 / scourchesne / Leave a comment

…or, maybe just your syrinx?

Beachgoer and gull noticer George Ingalls sent in a video and a question about a curious encounter he had with a gull in Maine. The herring gull had approached him and some friends, obviously hoping for some food. George reported that the bird was making a very cat-like meowing sound. This did not surprise me, since gulls make a call called a “mew” and another called a “yeow” and it all can be a bit cat-like. The mew call is given with the head lowered and the neck arched. It’s communicative purpose can vary a lot–sometimes it’s to call the kids back if they’ve wandered to far, sometimes it’s to call a mate in to help with nest defense–basically, the mew varies with context. I figured the gull George saw and heard was doing a mew, but when I watched the video, what I heard was waaaay more feline than the standard gull sound.

The remarkably feline vocal stylings of a herring gull. (video by George Ingalls)

George had speculated that maybe the bird had damaged vocal cords or something like that. Birds don’t have vocal chords like we do, and their soundmaking equivalent of our “voice box,” the syrinx, is not high up in the throat like ours, but down in their chests, at the point where the trachea ends and splits into two bronchial tubes. Nonetheless, gulls do definitely suffer oral and throat trauma routinely, getting fishing hooks and such embedded in those tissues. It’s possible that this bird did have some sort of similar trauma that altered its voice.

We do encounter some variability in vocal performances among the gulls of Appledore. In our database there are notes like, “husky voice–very sexy” for some individuals. As with George’s gull, we never really know what accounts for these individual differences, but they are always cool to hear, and we’re grateful to George for capturing this one on video so we can all hear this bird produce less a mew than a meow.

The Gulls Of Appledore

Seabird ecology on an island in Maine