It’s easy to ignore common things. For example, many people seem not to pay attention to seagulls or even know that there are various seagull species that look different from each other and, depending on age, look different within the same species. Here, we see the most common of our gulls flying in Naskeag Harbor on October 24.
This is an American Herring Gull. It’s sometimes called a Smithsonian Gull due to the fact that its scientific species name, “smithsonianus,” honors the English chemist James Smithson, whose financial bequest enabled the Smithsonian Institution to become successful. Here’s the same bird after it alighted on the Town Pier nd eyes us suspiciously:
We can tell from this bird’s gray-mottled head and pink legs that it’s a nonbreeding adult that is four or more years old. We can’t tell whether it will migrate south, which most of our gulls do. But, we always have a few true Mainer gulls that hunker through the winter. In fact, the number of fulltime gull residents seems to have increased in the past few years along with our ambient and water temperatures. This one seems comfortable now, however.
These birds can be brash when it comes to getting the food that they need, especially in winter. But they’re also smart and don’t waste their time on useless acts. This was proved by a British experiment during World War II.
One of the birds’ traits is to flock around food sources, be they schools of fish or discarded food. The Brits decided to train Herring Gulls by feeding them fish from partially submerged periscopes. The hope was that the trained birds would automatically swarm German U-Boat periscopes to find fish and give notice of the presence of a subs. The gulls swarmed the training periscopes that had been supplied with fish; they ignored the same periscopes when they had no fish. (Brooklin, Maine)