I’ve been trying for a while to figure out my problem with laughing gulls.
It’s not something I’ve been analyzing on an everyday basis, like my inability to train a dog, or my maladroitness at making high-quality small talk, but it pops up in my mind every once in a while. Particularly when I’m looking at a laughing gull.
It resurfaced the other day while I was riding my bike around the island looking for some avian excitement. I cruised along Rest Beach, did an out-and-back on the White Street Pier, scofflawed my way under the walk-your-bike overhang at West Martello, and soft-pedaled past Salute, where a small crew was freshening up the mural on the fence. Sometimes you can get shorebirds in the smoothed-out sand of the littoral zone down near (Former-Vice-President-Cheney’s-first-name) Dock, so I walked my bike out there. Nothing. Until I looked down and saw a mid-sized posse of laughing gulls standing in the sand, staring off in about nine different directions. Ugh, I thought. And then wondered, why always the ugh?
Arguably, as a birdwatcher, I should appreciate all birds. I don’t have to love them all equally – everyone has their favorites. But every bird species is the result of eons of evolution. Every bird species has worked out its niche in the natural world, and sometimes in the unnatural world, and that should be appreciated.
Honestly, I think of it as a personal failing. If I were a more appreciative, more perceptive naturalist I would find a personal avenue of appreciation for the laughing gulls. The fact that they are one of the most ubiquitous birds on the east coast should not make me think less of them. A big population means they are good at making their way in the world. If the only thing that perks your interest in birds (or anything else) is its rarity, you don’t love the bird (or the thing) so much as you love its statistic. You’re like one of those music snobs you knew in high school who only liked a band when no one else liked it.
Birders who are really into gulls are called laridophiles. And while I am no laridophile, I am certainly no laridophobe. I have a big appreciation/fondness for gulls both large and small – Bonaparte’s gulls, herring gulls, lesser black-backed gulls, even ring-billed gulls. One of the better mornings of my life was a decade or two ago when I was out birding with a guy named Gerard Phillips and we found one of the first slaty-backed gulls ever seen in the lower 48 states. (I knew it was a weird gull not normally seen around here; he knew immediately what species it was.)
I think my issues with laughing gulls fall into two categories. First, from a purely aesthetic standpoint, they’re boring. They start life a lackluster, scuffed-shoe brown, then molt through various permutations of mismatched gray until they hit adulthood, looking not unreminiscent of a car someone started restoring, but gave up on, leaving mismatched shades of Bondo and primer. Granted, as adults, in peak breeding season, they can look pretty snazzy, with a dark gray mantle, a black head, a sporty white broken eye ring, and a bill that can be entirely deep red, or just black and lined a deep red at the edges, like lipstick. But in the non-breeding season they revert back to a paler gray and a patchy piebald head.
And it’s not just that. Laughing gulls are arguably really good at almost everything they do. After being nearly wiped out in the early 1900s due to egg collecting and the hat-making trade, legal protections have helped them come back to over half a million breeding pairs on the east coast, the Gulf and Caribbean.
Laughing gulls are also amazingly strong and precise flyers, able to hold their own in 6-knot winds. They just do everything with no panache or elan. They make everything look so … unremarkable.
Also – and this second category of my issues may be the biggest part – laughing gulls are assholes. I’ve given a whole PowerPoint presentation about this. But the short version is, they steal from and harass other birds when they don’t need to. Laughing gulls are pretty omnivorous, and insanely flexible in their diet. I could fill the rest of this column just listing the categories of food they can ingest and digest with no problem. So they are never lacking for sustenance.
When a brown pelican dives into the water and comes up with a gular pouch of fish, they need to sit for a few seconds to let the water drain out the sides of their mouth before swallowing. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a laughing gull swoop in, land on top of the brown pelican’s head, and then pry the pelican’s bill open with their shorter, more chisel-like bill, so they can steal fish from the pelican’s mouth.
I’ve also seen them do very similar acts of kleptoparasitism to white ibis.
It’s just so unnecessary. And sure, maybe it is inapt and arguably insane to judge an animal’s behavior by fussy human moral codes, but come on. Not cool.
I am not arguing against their right to exist or anything. They no doubt fill a number of necessary ecological niches that help keep the natural world from falling into imbalance more than it already is. I just want them to do better.
My friend Matt Talbot is a serious home brewer. I am wowed and impressed by how good he is at it, how experimental he can get, how great it all tastes. (This is not just because he gives the beer to his friends for free.) The only hitch I see in his beer-making giddyup is the labels he puts on his bottles: Laughing Gull Brewing. I forgive him for this, despite having shared my opinions about the shortcomings of laughing gulls more than a few times.
I texted him when I started this column, asked him to make a defense of the laughing gulls, to show me what I might be missing. He texted back pretty quickly.
“I like that they are unassuming, not flashy or looking to draw attention, but they have those smart eyes. They’re patient, observant and clever beach snack thieves. I’ve watched them stalk from a distance and wait for some shoobies to leave a bag of chips unattended, then literally open the bag and help themselves,” he texted. (Shoobies is somewhat pejorative slang for day trippers at the Jersey Shore.)
“They’re not laughing with us, they’re mockingly laughing at us and they’re right to,” he said.
Laughing gulls as agents of chaos — I may actually be able to warm to that theory.
