Lost in a Gull

I’ve blackened the gull’s name and reputation in previous posts. It feels odd to be passing judgment on birds I admire so much. Gulls can’t be blamed for taking easy prey, and exploiting spilled bait and incidental catch of the lobster boats. They are supreme opportunists, long lived and crafty. But what kind of predator virtually eliminates its prey base, takes almost every hatchling? What is going on here between gulls and eiders? And what will we do about it, if anything?

On Monhegan Island, we hiked across from the ferry dock to the cliffs on the lee side of the island, some eight miles out from the mainland. Vicious currents make this a deadly spot for anyone who enters the water. No one who has gone overboard on the lee side of Monhegan has ever been saved, according to the tourist brochure that spells out a detailed code of conduct for this tiny but heavily used island. All right. We wouldn't so much as stick a toe in the surf.

This gull noticed that we had food with us, sandwiches and other prime gull fare. She pressed close, close enough for me to notice the sloping brow that characterizes a female herring gull. (The male’s is much steeper. The same difference applies to male and female common loons). She appraised us with icy yellow eyes, looking for her chance, perhaps beseeching. We tossed her a bit of pizza crust now and then, and I got lost in the intelligence in her cool lemon eyes.This creature might live 30 or more years. She knows a lot. She knows I am going to cave in and give her some pizza now, and maybe a little bit of my Italian panini sandwich. Oh, yes, she knows.

When she felt conflicted or ill at ease, she'd stare at her feet, the way a raptor does. I found that interesting--that behavior crosses taxa. And found myself wondering how many other birds foot-stare when they don't know what else to do. Herons? Storks? Rails? Ostriches? I'd love to know. I like the old-lady pink of her feet, the out-turned toenail on the outer toe.

Lost in the curve of her wings, and the ease with which she lifted off over the roiling ocean. How I wanted to fly with her. My bones felt like lead, rooted to the rock and lichens.She preened calmly as the surf boiled hundreds of feet below. Overcast, pewter surf--could there be a more perfect photographic salon for a silver and white bird?She took grass to her nest on the cliff face. A shape-shifter, she is. How does she do that with her primaries?She was perfect, immaculate, mistress of the updrafts, bent on survival.
Who can blame her for taking what is offered her, be it bread or duckling? She is no different from me. I don't hate gulls. I wish they didn't eat eiders, that's all. And I feel immeasurably blessed to have spent a few hours in her company, and to be able to share her beauty with you.

Eiders in Trouble

After seeing packs of female eiders swimming along without young when each one should have been followed by a brood, we were getting depressed. Productivity in Maine eiders is extremely low, while productivity in Maine gulls is extremely high. The predatory gulls are heavily subsidized by lobster fishing and fast-food dumpsters. Nobody’s subsidizing the eiders. They’ve got to deal with more gulls than they’ve ever battled, and they’re essentially defenseless. What's a duck going to do when a great black-backed gull drops out of the sky and snatches her duckling? In an email today, Scott Weidensaul told me that the female eiders stick together and form a creche with their young. He wrote, " Sara Morris, in her years out on Appledore Island, once saw two hen eiders reach up at an attacking gull, each grab a wing, and slam the gull into the water like a stone, almost killing it." And yet even this spirited defense has little efficacy against so many gulls. A common eider productivity study by Kim Mawhinney in 1995 in the Bay of Fundy had 3000 ducklings hatched. Twelve of them made it to fledging age. Nearly all the rest went down the capacious gullets of gulls. Does that sound sustainable to you? Strenuous gull nest control efforts in 1996, including oiling gull eggs to prevent hatching, resulted in no decline in gull predation on the eiders: eight eider ducklings in the same population survived to fledge in 1996.

Finally, as we left Monhegan Island, we saw a couple of hen eider with young. Not many, but some. It’s interesting to watch the females when they’re swimming with flightless young. Normally, they’d fly when pressed by an approaching vessel. When they’ve got flightless ducklings in tow, they resort to “steaming,” paddling rapidly over the surface using their feet and wings. It’s this evasive behavior that named the flightless Falkland Island steamer ducks, creatures of rushing mountain stream habitats. The birds have no need to fly, and have lost the ability. These female eiders are steaming in solidarity with their as yet flightless young.

Everywhere we went, we saw eiders loafing along the rocks, often with seals. I fought back a tinge of sadness even as I admired the drake’s beauty and the hens’ perfect rockweed brown camouflage, because I knew that the females should have been busy tending their young in the second week of June. What future does the common eider have in Maine, or the entire Atlantic? The same trends are occurring in the Pacific populations. Perhaps only aggressive gull control--eliminating adult gulls as well as their eggs-- could give the seaducks enough edge to enjoy some population growth. We can't take for granted that there will always be eiders. As the long-lived adults die off, what will replace them? We can be sure that, thanks to our landfills, fishing boats and dumpsters, there will always be gulls. Are we willing to lose eiders altogether? We must always be mindful of our impact on natural systems, and be ready to counterbalance the imbalance we unwittingly create.

A fishing boat, swarmed with feeding gulls