09/24/2020
GULLS - Almost a year and a half ago I stepped out of the brush onto a mystical rocky landscape 10 miles from the mainland in order to traverse the hundred foot tall cliffs the island of Monhegan is known for. It was early in the morning; the air was taken up by a fog bank that had not yet been broken by the rising sun, along with the sounds of a familiar bird. The sound was one I recognized from the lifetime of moments spent along the ocean that I am thankful to have lived, though the sound itself brought me mixed emotions. My ears had once been filled with it while taking in the beauty of a gleaming Atlantic sunrise, but also just after delicious food was about to enter my mouth only to then disappear into the sky. It’s associated with an animal I’ve heard many call a pest, just as a rat would have. The truth is that sometimes the wails and screeches of a crying seagull did in fact manage to tear into my deep respect for the living creatures of this world. Having said that I began to view them differently that day on the island. As I hiked the stretch of coastline I witnessed thousands of gulls incubating in their nests, awaiting the arrival of the next generation. For one of the first times I saw them as nurturing parents. And it wasn’t until I was introduced into birding later on that I began to notice the vast differences that are present among these well-known animals; there are over 50 species worldwide, with almost half of them existing on North America’s east coast. Some have black rings and strange spots around their neck or bill, some have universally white plumage. There are some with black heads, some that have contrasty lines, and some with intricately shaped tails. Some species migrate around the world every year, and some are just as small as a tern. I can’t help but mention that their chicks are also simply adorable. My journeys to the Isles Of Shoals gave me a first look at the strikingly speckled hatchlings and juveniles that go on to become what we all know from the mainland. They are guarded fiercely by the adults and will dive bomb you for getting too close. Anyone who knows my precarious nature will correctly assume that it has happened to me. All the days I’ve been out there I’ve thought to myself how crazy it must be, for so many of us to look at them with such unenthusiasm. They’re more intelligent than I ever thought, having shown tool-use behavior in some studies, and yet they are persecuted for taking advantage of our carelessness. Believe it or not, at a point in history before seabird protection laws were enacted, gulls were hunted to near extinction for food, the fashion industry, and for fun. I now begin to imagine what it would be like without them, an Isle in the Shoals with no living obstacles giving character to the rocks, and suddenly a part of me starts to appreciate the noisy birds that hover over me as the wind flows above the edge of a cliff I stand on. While gull populations rose to healthy levels in the 1900s, our region is now seeing steady declines of 40 to 70 percent in the recent decade for reasons such as land use and climate change. We take them for granted because they are everywhere, but I think it’s time for us to start valuing them. This summer I paddled out to some interesting small islands off of Pepperrell Cove in order to monitor two greater black-backed gull families that were nesting there, part of an independent school study I was working on, and in my research I discovered things about them that changed the impressions they had on me. Gulls have the ability to recognize individual people, and given the fact they see me and my kayak frequently, there’s a good chance I am a part of their lives as much as they are a part of mine. I’ve visited gulls nesting on those islands for years, but it wasn’t until this year that I realized they were actually the same gulls, happening as they are monogamous and come back to the same spots annually. That means something to me, both as an artist interacting with his subject, and as a human soul interacting with the natural world. The issue of mistreating and misrepresenting a species of abundance should be talked about, because otherwise the conservation efforts originally meant to bring them into their plenitude become disarrayed and fall apart. So I leave you all with these images, in hopes that they maybe spark something different in people when observing the world around them… or maybe not… that's possible too 🤷♂️
