You have to use a bit of stealth in approaching these big gulls. (It must be spring as the orange spot under the tip of its bill indicates). Nonchalantly pretending I was interested in something else ...
fooled this gull long enough to take a photo. Then it saw me and ...
of course off it flew!
It's amazing what I can find to distract me from my studies. This time is was a bunch of southern black-backed gulls circling over the hospital and its helipad.
Coincidentally there was an item in the local paper yesterday about the nuisance that these big gulls are causing at the Green Island rubbish tip / landfill. The city council has got permission to poison the gulls. Apparently the poison is spread on bread, gulls and other non-target species, eat the bait and keel over with hypothermia. Non-target species - mostly red-billed and black-billed gulls - are then revived by warming. The hope is that black-backed gulls will stop visiting the tip when they see their colleagues keeling over. So too, I suspect will the other gulls.
On closer inspection a man on the roof could be just discerned, he looked to be cleaning something, perhaps he'd disturbed the gulls. There again if the gulls were a more or less permanent feature of the hospital roof, I wouldn't have been so distracted by them. Hope they don't become a permanent feature, it would be bad news for both gulls and helicopters!
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.
