I’m trying, but I can’t bring myself to care about gulls
...or can I?
I recently spent a beautiful Sunday afternoon enjoying nature at my local wastewater treatment facility and landfill.
Every birder instantly understands, possibly sitting up and thinking “Tell us more about these sewage ponds and trash mountains, please.”
It’s counter intuitive, I know, but birds – and, therefore, birders – love a garbage dump. And a murky lagoon. The two of them in one spot? Golden. The Birdist, Nicholas Lund, does a great job of explaining why in this excellent Audubon post:
Birds are at dumps because there’s a ton of food. If you’ve never visited an active landfill before, it’s pretty much just what you imagine: a giant mountain of smelly trash being shoved around by a couple of bulldozers. The trash includes everything that’s thrown away: deflated basketballs, plastic bags, creepy headless dolls, and tons and tons of food scraps. Food scraps that are, of course, delicious meals for birds.
Birds are at sewage treatment plants because there’s a lot of water. If you’ve never visited a sewage treatment plant before, it’s probably not what you imagine. Yes, it’s a facility that handles the things we’ve flushed down our toilets, separating the waste from the water, but most of that happens out of sight. What birders see when they visit a sewage treatment plant (also known as a wastewater treatment plant) are ponds. Non-smelly, verdant, open “stabilization ponds,” which aid in the natural separating of water and solids.
An unexpected jewel of the Lower Michigan birding community
My stinky stomping grounds can be found at the Muskegon County Resource Recovery Center, formerly (and still informally) known as the Muskegon Wastewater.
The MCRRC is a massive feat of ecological engineering. It has a conservation certification via the Wildlife Habitat Council and is a beloved staple of the West Michigan birding community. The facility generously allows free access to bird by car, provided you request a permit and follow all of the rules and signage.
More than 250 species have been recorded on its trash-strewn, brown-water-soaked shores. It’s a reliable — and extremely well-maintained — spot to see weird winter ducks, bald eagles, owls (I’ve seen short-eared and snowy), grassland birds, geese, hawks and gulls. So many gulls.
(Not seagulls. Just gulls. Seagulls are not a thing, as any pedantic birder will remind the weary listener.)
Gulls. The bane of many a birder’s existence. They’re tough to ID to the point where even the most dedicated birder may simply pretend they don’t exist.
I’m by no means an obsessive lister, but I do aim to identify as many birds as possible when I’m out, plus a target number of species every year. My best birding friend and I engage in an annual, low-stakes competition to see who racks up more positive IDs on our respective eBird lists. Even so, more often than not, I’m content to mark down a noncommittal “gull sp.” – which does NOT count toward my annual species total – than to train my binoculars on the nameless masses and fuss over the minutia of the placement of a red spot on a squawking beak.
What is it about gulls, though? I’m far more willing to pour far more work into identifying a single warbler – even in its drab fall wear – than my cumulative interest in every gull that has ever lived or ever will live.
Is it because I always associate gulls with garbage? They’re just the sky rats that steal our fries at the beach, while flaunting a flagrant disregard for the trajectory of their poop?
In seeking out gull-ambivalent birder voices to vindicate my argument, I came across a blog (“Overcoming gull-ID phobia”) from noted birder/writer Pete Dunne, who, with Kevin T. Karlson, penned the well-regarded, “Gulls Simplified: A Comparative Approach to Identification.” But instead of Dunne’s blog validating my “take ‘em or leave ‘em” attitude, the succinct piece had the opposite effect:
What is it about this bird group that afflicts observers with identification paralysis? In fact, so dismissive are birders about gulls that many observers, when confronted by a feathered brown miscreant on the beach, don’t even look at it.
What a misfortune. To categorically ignore gulls deprives birders of insight into one of the planet’s most entertaining, socially complex, successful, and intelligent bird families.
He offers grounding principles for identifying gulls, dispels a few myths and confronts the misgivings a birder may have about getting more specific than a shoulder shrug and an ambivalent “gull sp.”
Dunne describes the behavioral differences between a ring-billed gull and a herring gull, the latter being “intelligent enough to drop mollusks onto hard surfaces to decant the gastronomic delights within.” Reading this brought to mind hanging out with my dad, seaside in Massachusetts, watching herring gulls drop crabs onto rocks 15 feet below. They’d then swoop down to jealously guard the tender bits pulled from inside the cracked shells, before starting the process all over again.
My parents, who (mostly) retired some years ago to coastal New England, spend at least some time on most days at an oceanside park, watching the undulating birds and boats drifting in the harbor.
My father also works a part-time, groundskeeper-esque job at that park, clearing overgrown trails, moving picnic tables and meticulously removing cigarette butts and infinitesimal pieces of styrofoam from the rocky shore, determined to keep the pollutants from entering the harbor’s waters and eventually, some poor sea creature’s stomach.
Dad regularly texts me photos of whatever bird has caught his eye that day. Sometimes, a distant osprey. More often, an uncomfortably close gull.
Dad’s the one who first pointed out to me that gulls will use the rocks as tools to get at the meaty parts of the crabs that they pluck from the retreating waves. He’s out there for hours every week, spring through fall, and took the time to observe the gulls’ habits and draw conclusions about their behavior (well beyond the consideration his snooty birder daughter had ever given a gull).
A wise person told me “curiosity is the enemy of judgment.” It shouldn’t have taken a blog written by an elite birder — a stranger, at that — to remind me of this simple fact, but it did, and that’s OK. Simple curiosity has seldom failed to change my mind about any aspect of the natural world.
I was terrified* of spiders until my late 20s, when I moved to Florida and used my pocket guide to the Sunshine State’s flora and fauna to begin identifying my eight-legged tormentors. To paraphrase Yoda and take some liberties with the meaning of the quote — naming a fear is a way to overcome it.
(*I’m not not scared of spiders now. But we’ve downgraded from DEFCON 1 to DEFCON 4. A marked improvement.)
Likewise, I was apathetic about sparrows until a few years ago when I heard about the Sparrow Appreciation Society, and perused their cheerful grid of Instagram photos. Surely, if others are so passionate about sparrows, there must be something interesting there to learn. Now, instead of dismissively waving my hand at “little brown birds,” I’m seeking out new sparrow species to add to my life list.
About those gulls, then?
I set out to write a roundabout defense of why a birder need not be a completist in order to be considered a valid birder, using the gull family as my example and scapegoat. But the slightest awakening of curiosity took the wind out of those particular sails.
I stand by my assertion that my claim to birding is no less valid simply because of my inability to rattle off the name of every shorebird, weird winter duck or any other family of bird.
And I don’t foresee myself reaching Dunne levels of gull awareness. But, maybe, it’s a good weekend to take a trip out to a stinky trash heap, and see who I can name.
Resources and references:
Gulls and Canadian Geese. They’re everywhere, and they’re irritating. That makes it easy to be dismissive of them.