Subject: [Tweeters] Peregrine versus Ring-billed Gull
Date: Thu Nov 12 06:47:35 PST 2020
From: Gary Bletsch - garybletsch at yahoo.com

Dear Tweeters,
Yesterday (Armistice Day) I noticed a lone Ring-billed Gull flying energetically over the fields north of Gear Road. This site is just north of Burlington, along Old Highway 99. 
When I put the scope on this gull, to find out why it was zigging and zagging so much, I realized that it was being chased by an immature Peregrine Falcon. For three to four minutes, the two of them kept it up. Sometimes the gull would chase after the falcon, other times the falcon would pursue the gull. They would swoop and careen this way and that, mostly within 30 meters of the ground. There was no gull flock anywhere nearby, although that particular set of fields often hosts huge gatherings of Mew and Ring-billed Gulls.
Eventually, after many near collisions, the two birds disappeared behind a low berm of soil. I turned on the car and raced over there, but it took me at least five minutes to exit the industrial area, cross the railway line, drive north, and then turn onto the little, dead-end bit of Green Road that heads south from Cook Road. 
A few hundred meters off in the field, in the same spot where the falcon and gull had disappeared five minutes earlier, an adult Bald Eagle was eating something. A juvenile Red-tailed Hawk was watching from a respectful distance. All that I could see of the prey item was a pile of white feathers. There was no sign of the Peregrine.
Yours truly,
Gary Bletsch
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