It has begun – someone notify Tippy Hedren. This week brought the first examples of that late summer phenomenon that so confuses the tourists, and so frightens the ornithophobes – erratic, swirling flocks of flying gulls. What are they doing? And is this a sign of the apocalypse? Relax, there is a clear scientific explanation, and this is most definitely – probably – not a sign of the apocalypse.
For about a century my family has done our summer beaching at White Horse Beach in Plymouth. I was there this past weekend with assorted siblings and nieces. As I attempted some pointless fishing, my original niece, born when I was just 9, was floating nearby, facing the land. Looking concerned, she said, said “OK Uncle Mark, what’s going on here” gesturing behind me. There I saw the familiar sight of a few hundred gulls, mostly Laughing Gulls and a few Ring-billed Gulls, flycatching high in the air.
Another of my nieces, who represents the bird-fearing ornithophobe set, refused to look at the gulls, in the same way that she, logically, refuses to watch the Hitchcock film. The gulls zig-zagged acrobatically about, like swallows, all in a relatively small bit of airspace. To the avian Philistine, the behavior seems strange for a gull, especially from the same undignified Ring-billed Gulls that were just begging for potato chips at our beach encampment. But smaller gulls, mainly Laughing and Ring-billed Gulls around here, can manage the sort of mid-air maneuvering necessary to take advantage of late summer swarms of flying ants, which invariably is what these flycatching gulls are after.
Ant colonies eventually outgrow themselves, at which point they produce males and queens with wings, who emerge en masse then fly off to mate and form new colonies. Male ants only exist for this brief time and purpose – ant colonies are otherwise just queens and female workers. Once mated, the now useless males die, and the duty-bound females, astonishingly, chew off their own wings and start digging to begin a new colony. I wonder if any of the queens decides instead to keep her wings and maybe spend a year in Italy before having kids? Does anyone else smell a new Pixar film!
In any case, this whole gulls-eating ants thing is not all that’s going on with birds right now. Long-time Boston-area birder Erik Neilsen hit the jackpot on Monday when he photographed a Bridled Tern at Gooseberry Neck in Westport. This pan-tropical seabird is mostly found on this coast in the Caribbean and up along the Gulf Stream in very small numbers, where it is associated with bits of flotsam far offshore. This Bridled Tern is likely the only legitimate rarity produced anywhere in the northeast by hurricane Erin, which stayed too far offshore to bring us much.
No one has seen the Bridled Tern since Monday, so keep an eye out for a tern with a charcoal gray back and white forehead among the usual terns at your local beach. Terns also join the swarms of gulls feeding on ants, so check those too. But tern on no tern, the gulls are here and they are massing ominously in ways that draw the word “Hitchcockian” from the lips of many. The only question is, are they out for blood, or just your potato chips?
