Subject: [Tweeters] guillemot feeding behaviour
Date: Aug 14 15:48:53 2006
From: Josh Hayes - josh at blarg.net


B & P Bell wrote in part:

> We finished up a John Wayne Marina. At the northern end we had extremely
> good, close looks at a breeding plumage PIGEON GUILLEMOT working a fish
> over preparatory to eating it...

[snip]

That reminds me, I meant to ask about this on tweeters.

While we were at Fort Flagler, we spent a lot of time on the beach near the
boat launch there, where there was regularly a little flotilla of guillemots
working close to shore. Often, several at once would surface with fish in
their bills, but then they'd paddle around aimlessly for several minutes, or
even fly off a little ways, still with the fish hanging out of the mouth.

Why?

You see a merganser, or a heron, snag a fish, and *snap* it's gone. Why do
these guys not do that? Are they waiting for it to stop struggling? Showing
off to prospective mates (hey, baby, check out the size of MY fish!), or
what?

Incidentally, they all seemed to be the same sort of fish, unidentifiable at
that range through binocs, but rather elongate, eel-shaped, and
reddish-brown. Any ideas of what they were chasing around so successfully?

-Josh Hayes, josh at blarg dot net