Hi Tweeters

An entry in the "It's Not Against Any Religion/To Want To Dispose Of A
Pigeon" file.

Today (8//11) I saw several sequences of photographs which made my hair
stand on end. They showed an adult Glaucous-winged Gull (Larus glaucescens)
premeditatedly approaching a flock of Rock Doves with a nonchalant air,
then hunkering down into a stalking mode (slightly crouched, head level
with body axis which was parallel to the ground), selecting a victim,
maneuvering closer, and finally charging its target, grabbing and killing
it by carrying the pigeon in its mouth sometimes a good distance to water
and drowning it. According to the photographer, Evelyn Whiteside, the bird
has been doing this at least three times daily for several months and
sometimes (perhaps, she thinks, when it has young to feed) it will kill up
to 7 Rock Doves *per day, every day*. She has close-up photographs showing
in meticulous detail at least three successful and two unsuccessful
attempts. The other sequence shows it hunting after the Rock Doves got
wise and avoided close approach, when it would hide like a cat below a six-
to eight-inch bank of earth beside a pond, suddenly erupting out when the
flock was close enough and grabbing one. One photograph shows this bird,
head barely showing and lethal purpose in its eyes (yeah, I know about
anthropo-etc, but ya gotta see this photograph; no hunting cat ever looked
more focussed), peeking over the bank with just its head showing as it
selects one of the Rock Doves in the foreground. Absolutely chilling. After
the pigeons became more cautious it adopted another strategy: Evelyn says
this gull has learned to herd the flock through deliberate panic to
particular locations where it finds catching and killing single pigeons to
be easier.
I've always thought that, if Archie is the transmigrated soul of a verse
libre poet, then the large white-headed gulls house the souls of past
tax-collectors who have to work off their karma with a few more turns on
the Great Wheel. Glaucous-winged Gulls don't look particularly friendly at
the best of times, but even by that low standard this guy's a nasty
customer who knows his Tom Lehrer.
Has anyone else seen sustained, tactically adaptive hunting by GWGU's like
this? How would they learn this, and who from? In the wild, maybe
maurauding through other seabird colonies? In the cities, maybe aping a cat
it's just seen nail a pigeon? And why just Rock Doves, at least in
Vancouver BC? *Is* it just Rock Doves, or do some branch out into other
families for avian prey in other locations? Any other urban gull hunting
stories out there?
I've heard of one instance where an adult tried to pilfer a kitten off a
windowsill and I've occasionally (3 times over 15 yrs) seen GWGU'S hunting
and killing Rock Doves, but, except for one instance, seemed more a whim of
an individual gull (like some guy starting a fight in a bar just for the
heck of it, and the other guy simply being in the wrong place at the wrong
time) than premeditated hunting (a query: do other large gull sp. besides
this one and Gr. Black-backed actively hunt other large birds?).
The other example was a flock of about twenty GWGU's forcing a Rock Dove
out over the water, the whole lot spiralling higher while two or three
gulls attacked from beneath until the prey came tumbling down to the water,
whereupon one of the gulls held its head under water, another pecked at the
nape, and yet another opened up the body cavity of the hapless pigeon. When
it was finally dead, a few of the twenty or so gulls present on the water
fed desultorily for about five minutes and left the remainder as though
they had really been more interested in action than food.

Boy, do I long for the days when Nature meant cute little bunnies and
butterflies....