Subject: jaegers as predators
Date: Aug 23 12:11:42 1994
From: Dennis Paulson - dpaulson at ups.edu


I enjoyed reading Mike Smith's posting about jaegers. I too have watched
them a lot as predators in the Arctic, and they are very impressive indeed.
Parasitics specialize in nest robbing and bird catching more than the other
two, which tend (especially the pomarine) to be lemming specialists. Of
course if you watch jaegers being kleptoparasites on their nonbreeding
grounds, you realize that nothing could outfly them. A friend of mine
regaled me with a tale from Barrow, Alaska, where he saw a pair of
parasitics unceremoniously evict a peregrine from their territory by
literally flying circles around it--the peregrine at full cruising speed
but helpless in the face of the jaegers' agility. I've seen long-tailed
jaegers mob parasitics, and parasitics mob pomarines, and the aerial antics
took my breath away. I've also been hit in the head by a long-tailed
defending its nest, one of the less-fun experiences I've had in nature; it
would make me very nervous indeed around the nest of a skua (actually I
took photos of a friend in a somewhat panicked mode being divebombed by a
skua at its nest). It's hard to imagine anything preying on one of these
birds. Jaegers are gulls, but they're certainly not *just* gulls. Actually,
come to think of it, neither are gulls *just* gulls!

I've also watched long-tailed jaegers in numbers walking slowly over the
arctic tundra, picking insects and spiders from among the plants just like
a passerine and certainly not anything you'd expect a falcon to do.

Dennis Paulson
University of Puget Sound

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