Birds and Beaches

If you know of anything that surpasses sitting on a quiet beach while birds wheel about, catching their lunch, please write me. 

We're just back from the causeway to Anna Maria Island, on the edge of the Gulf of Mexico,  where we spent three hours watching laughing gulls, a loon, pelicans, great blue herons, egrets, terns and and a lonely sandpiper do what they must do each day to stay alive.

The laughing gulls were the most active - and the louded, of course. One of their flock caught a spiny fish, maybe four inches long. It seemed too large for him to swallow but he spent a long time washing the debris off the fish and positioning it, head down, so it would slide down his throat. In the meantime, his buddies cackled and laughed and tried to separate him from his catch.

He dragged the fish well up on the land and continually flipped it back and forth, presumably trying to tear it into bitesize chunks. But it was a tough little fish. So the gull said, "Here goes" and swallowed it, spines and all. That seemed to settle the arguments among the other gulls so he was left alone for a bit. 

But that fish stuck in his throat and it didn't take long for him to regurgitate it. He worked again and chopping it up without success. His buddied returned to annoy and harrass him, so he chomped down on it and swallowed his catch one more time.

We watched the pelicans as they swooped and slid across the bay, eye down, on a glide path that they would alter in a millisecond if they caught sight of a fish. They immediately contorted and dived in that prehistoric pterodactyl-like way. Up they'd come with the fish in their bills and then they would flip it around so it would head down to their stomachs head first.

A silent loon lingered off-shore, diving and feeding but nevder making the loon sound that we love to hear when they are in the northern states. These birds fly south to Florida for the winter but they are mute while in the south. Their plaintive cry comes only when they are in the lakes of New Hampshire or Maine or Vermont.

If you click on the main picture at the top of the blog, you'll see a much enlarged version. If you click on the loon picture at the top left, that will take you to our photo album of the birds.