Yesterday the sun tried hard to come out to play from behind the coastal fog which can just be discerned on the horizon.
The sun eventually managed to shine during the afternoon. It was an exceptionally low tide, showing the underlying chanels and the rolling morphology of the sea bottom which cause the dangerous tidal rips when the tide is in.
The gulls were unimpressed, just hanging about waiting for someone to throw them a few crumbs which they could then squabble over in gull-fashion.
The beach this morning was littered with large amounts of kelp washed up by the rough weather over the last four days.
The local kelp beds are close to the shore, just on the rocky headland and round the seaward side of St Clair Salt Water Pool. Some of the kelp is large, the holdfast here measuring about 30cms. (The holdfast is the 'root system' for these brown algae; usually they can hang onto rocky strata through all sorts of storms unless the individual plant is old.)
The washed-up kelp has attracted several southern black-backed gulls, scavenging for shrimps and other fauna that make the kelp their home. This species is virtually indistinguishable from the northern hemisphere, lesser black-backed gull.
A first-year immature makes a nuisance of itself with its parent.
But the adult doesn't want to know. We watched the performance for a full ten minutes.
Despite the full head down begging posture of the immature gull. Clearly the adult thought the fledgling should be able to feed itself by now. Chicks are usually fed by both parents, who regurgitate food on demand. So I suppose it's not surprising to find an older chick trying its luck.
A nearby adult squawks noisily. I'm not sure where the breeding colony is, possibly on White Island, about 2kms out to sea.
'It’s so difficult to remember what order things occurred in – but if you can’t remember that, then it’s impossible to work out which led to which, and what the connection was. What I remember, when I examine my memory carefully, isn’t a narrative at all. It’s a collection of vivid particulars. Certain words spoken, certain objects glimpsed. Certain gestures and expressions. Certain moods, certain weathers, certain times of day and states of light. Certain individual moments, which seem to mean so much, but which mean in fact so little until the hidden links between them have been found.' Quoted from Spies by Michael Frayn, Faber & Faber, Pbk 2003.
The rain continues, and the gulls are gathering ...
on the way home we saw them maintaining a wet but ...
watchful presence.
Perhaps, they've been watching the movies, Hitchcock's Birds comes to mind.
It rained all day yesterday. Like gulls the world over, our red-billed gulls come inland during inclement weather to haunt the local parks. This one though, is probably one of the resident gulls at the Gardens Supermarket, that utilise the pond nearby, and are always scavenging in the car-park.
A quick flick of the wipers didn't seem to alarm it much...
neither did getting out of the car. Maybe it couldn't be bothered to fly off in the misly rain.
Patterns that are made by barristas when they make coffee are a minor artform. You can read into them whole narratives, or landscapes, or cloudforms or some sort of pyschological game akin to Rorschach ink-blots.
