Subject: [Tweeters] Cal gull behaviour
Date: Sep 12 10:02:15 2010
From: Gary Bletsch - garybletsch at yahoo.com
Dear Tweeters,
Yesterday when I posted, I forgot to mention an odd behaviour I observed.
At the Samish West Ninety was a very frowsy-looking California Gull, in second-winter plumage. Quite a few of its rectrices were missing.
This gull was alone, with some Calidris sandpipers the only other birds nearby. The gull stood at the edge of a matt of seaweed on the outer side of the dike. Some of this seaweed is dried and draped over the rocks, some matted and heaped up on the stony beach, and more of it washing in and out with the swells. It might be eelgrass.
Anyway, the gull would patter with its feet in the very shallow little pools of water in between matts of weed. Every few moments, it would pull its feet upward and take a bite out of something small in the water.
I think the gull was using its webbed feet to swirl tiny invertebrates up out of the shallow water. I could never detect what it was eating, even at twenty meters range through a scope, so the tidbits must have been tiny ones.
Yours truly,
Gary Bletsch ? Near Lyman, Washington (Skagit County), USA ? garybletsch at yahoo.com ? ?