On Mon, 3 Jun 1996, Don Baccus wrote:
>After all, I could jump up and down for a quite awhile for a Dove
>Bar before expending the calories contained in one. And I'm not
>particularly skinny!

First, I'll offer Don a *case* of Dove bars if he'll videotape this and
put it on a web-site!

and Dennis Paulson replied (welcome back to tweeters Dennis):
> I'd say, from watching gulls and quite a variety of other birds (including
> just about any passerine present when this is happening) catching flying
> termites from swarms near the coast every summer, that the energy expended
> isn't all that great compared with the return. California, Ring-billed,
> and Bonaparte's gulls are confirmed termite-feeders, only rarely joined by
> the larger species, so maybe in fact it isn't energetically worthwhile for
> big gulls to do this, only the more agile, smaller species, in which
> capture is easier and energy gained relatively greater per gulp per gull.

In addition to the marvelous aerobatic feats they can execute, jaegers
take time out during the summer arctic bug 'blooms' to practice up on
their flycatching. I was surprised indeed to see this happen, considering
that the image most people (and at the time myself included) have of
jaegers is the jet-fighter mode necessary to pirate food from terns and
gulls, or to catch birds on wing in the arctic. But putting their
reputations aside, Long-tailed Jaegers will fly-catch whenever the
conditions are suitable, feasting on numerous arctic dipterans. Dennis
noted that larger gulls apparently sit out these feeding sessions, this is
possibly also true with jaegers. Despite the fact that Parasitic Jaegers
outnumbered the other two species combined by a substantial margin, I only
ever saw Long-tailed Jaegers flycatching. And with those long tail
fleathers fluttering out while they hopped up from pingos to catch flies,
I was left with a truly unconventional jaeger image.

I must confess that I'm really fascinated by jaegers, who have managed to
evolve up out of a clumsy gull-ness, into a genus which can rival falcons
in terms of flight agility, are quite adaptable predators, and are also
pretty dang good-looking. I think the guy who thought up the Stealth
aircraft stole the idea from a dark-morph Parasitic Jaeger. And in the
Fall when others are on the jetty gawking at shearwaters for errant
species, I'm just happy to see jaegers cruising around, spurning all
others.

-------------
Michael R. Smith
Univ. of Washington, Seattle
whimbrel at u.washington.edu
http://salmo.cqs.washington.edu/~wagap/mike.html
(how about those Sonics?)