Search / 45 posts tagged gulls

The gulls woke me up at the crack of dawn. Every morning they sit on the rooftops around our building screaming: Auw! Auw! Kee! Kee! Kee! Kee! Kyoh! Kyoh! Kyoh! Kyoh! With an effort of will I tuned them out and went back to sleep. I don’t know when Carol got up. A cicada wakes me up much later.

A gull bomber: See? They're gross. Gross and bad. Courtesy SancheznThat’s right, Buzzketeers, you heard it here first: Scotland has declared war. Muskets are being cleaned, shakos brushed, wigs powdered, kilts pleated… And who or what is this war on? England? No, Braveheart settled that one with an academy award.

I was flicking through Sibley (not as painful as it may sound, by the way) in a recent idle moment and cane upon the description of Lesser Black-backed Gull Larus fuscus which concludes with the paragraph, “Nearly all North American records are of the paler mantled Britain/Iceland population [graellsii].

Small School, Big Goals: Would-Be Redskin Westbrook Can Taste the NFL The manila folder belonging to student No. 1113408 is stuffed with athletic evaluations -- 40-yard dash time (4.4 seconds), pounds squatted in the gym (460) -- and e-mail correspondence.

Without trying to get up the nose of any serious gull-watcher out there who hasn’t had the opportunity to travel that I have, I’ve been incredibly fortunate to have seen virtually every single species of northern hemisphere gull in the last twenty years (and to do that you really need to get yourself out to the US/Canada, Europe, the Middle East, and the Far East.

As a vegetarian, animal lover and generally peaceful person, it takes a lot for me to want to hurt a living being. I pet any animal that will come near me. I cry when I see RSPCA ads. I despise people who hunt for sport.

On a birding boat ride on the bay (huh, how do you like that?) during the Kachemak Bay Shorebird festival a Bald Eagle threw all these Black-legged Kittiwakes into a swirling cloud around Bird Rock.  It was a sight to behold! Check out Skywatch Friday in other parts of the world.

Photography of Dirk Bolle, Amy Sondova, & Katie Tang. “Roll on, deep and dark blue ocean, roll. Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain. Man marks the earth with ruin, but his control stops with the shore.”–Lord Byron "Reflections" by Amy Sondova “Blue, green, grey, white, or black; smooth, ruffled, or mountainous; that ocean is not silent”–H.

…when it’s been renamed in the newly-released 49th Supplement to the A.O.U. Check-list of North American Birds, Seventh Edition. The new supplement includes various and sundry switches of interest to North American listers, ornithologists, and taxonomists but probably very few others.

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