Herring Gulls are common, which can lead to their being taken for granted.  They’re good looking birds, extraordinary flyers, monogamous and caring mates and parents, and they live for decades in the same general area – they stay “home.”

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They’ll swarm incoming fishing boats for scraps, a characteristic that inspired a desperate experiment by the British during World War I: scientists fed Herring Gulls from fake German periscopes in the hope that the birds could be conditioned to swarm around the real thing near the coast of England and help detect submarines. It didn’t work.

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(Brooklin, Maine)

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