Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 06:58:29 -0500 Reply-To: Maryland Birds & Birding Sender: Maryland Birds & Birding From: Scott Crabtree Subject: Re: Killer Gulls and other winter wonders MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Let's not be too hard on the gulls - they don't always have it as easy as you may think. This is an Alaskan story, not Maryland, so my apologies up front. A while back, I lived for a couple of years on the island of Adak in the central Aleutians. The most common gull was the Glaucous-winged, and they nested there. A feeding strategy of the juvenile birds was to hang around sea otters and glean food bits the otters either discarded or that floated away. At least this worked well in the lagoon or other sheltered waters because most of the otter population there were the smaller females. I once happened upon a juvenile Glaucous-wing trying this around a larger male sea otter who was feeding in the open Bering Sea. You can probably envision the rest - the gull got too close, the otter nabbed it, clamped down on the gulls neck until it stopped thrashing, and then plucked and ate it. The gull gene for getting too close to feeding otters was thereby culled from the gene pool! Scott Crabtree Baltimore, MD Betty Conley wrote: > Hello List, > > This is my first post to this list..... and I'm forwarding information that > was in The Beakly News (AOL's bird watching newsletter) today... it's okay > since I wrote this :-) > > >>Gulls on the Dark Side: According to a post on a New York birding listserv, > a Long Island birder watched in disbelief as a great black-backed gull > pounced on an American coot and slowly killed it. The poster, who was not > witness to this particular attack, noted that he has seen this species kill > many other birds, most recently immature laughing and ring-billed gulls. The > poster, hmcguinness@ross.org, is putting together a list of species that have > been killed and eaten by great black-backed gulls and he would appreciate > hearing from readers who might add their observations to the list.>> > > Feel free to cross-post -- contact hmcguinness@ross.org > > Betty Conley - MamaDuck1@aol.com > Long Island NY and Colesville MD > > ======================================================================= > To leave the MDOsprey list, send e-mail to listserv@home.ease.lsoft.com > with the following message in line 1: signoff mdosprey > ======================================================================= ======================================================================= To leave the MDOsprey list, send e-mail to listserv@home.ease.lsoft.com with the following message in line 1: signoff mdosprey ======================================================================= =========================================================================