If at first you don’t succeed

People call them air rats or trash birds, but I really like gulls. Especially the western gull (Larus occidentalis), known colloquially among birders as the WEGU. Yes, gulls eat garbage, but that’s only because humans are so good at making garbage and leaving it all over the place. Other gulls may travel quite far inland–in fact, the state bird of Utah is the California gull (Larus californicus)–but the WEGU is a California Current endemic species. This means that its natural food sources are the fishes and invertebrates of the California Current, which flows southwards along the west coast of North America. As a result, it lives in only a very narrow strip of coastline, nesting on cliffs and restaurant roofs.

Case in point. Yesterday afternoon I was at Moss Landing with my marine biology students. We had hiked along the road, over the dune to the beach, down the beach a ways, and returned over the dune to circle back to our starting point. The last item of note that we all watched was a western gull hunting along the shoreline of the Moss Landing harbor.

It had grabbed a crab. It looked like a rock crab, but I couldn’t tell what species.

The crab wasn’t dead, and was thrashing around enough to make it difficult for the gull to get a good grip on it.

Oops!

The crab gets a reprieve!

But the gull didn’t give up. It reached down, came back with the crab in its beak, and then flew off.

Sometimes it pays to be persistent!