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Mew Gull
Larus canus
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I confess - after my gull class, I have started to take a modest fondness to Mew gulls. Having seen them in the arctic on nests, and wintering here, I am starting to understand they work hard for a living.
I sense, in our culture, that our collective regard for gulls is a little low - maybe just one level above our regard for crows.
One of my heros, Niko Tinbergen, won the Nobel for creating ethology, the science of animal behavior. As a young man, Tinbergen devoted himself to studying the behaviors of a colony of Herring Gulls in his native Holland. I can't imagine anyone in America writing home to their parents saying "Dear Mom and Dad, I've decided to devote my life to studying gulls at the beach". The writer would be considered a little odd...at best...
I absolutely love Jamie Wyeth's new series The Seven Deadly Sins starring his lifelong subjects - gulls. Wyeth goes out of his way to portray gulls as social creatures, which they are. Throughout his career he has painted gulls as subjects for a variety of metaphors. Now he shows them in sin, and viewers think the choice quite apt.
But there's a silver lining for gulls and crows. Because both sexes share nesting duties, gulls have no need for colorful feathers. If they did, then right now there would be a worldwide effort to save them from extinction.
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Focal length: 700 mm
fStop: 5.6
ISO: 640
Shutter Speed: 1/2500 sec.
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Half Moon Bay, CA - Pillar Point
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Feb 12, 2010
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