Thank you, Laura Shovan, for hosting Poetry Friday today Here.
First, what an amazing and stunning star-studded inauguration! It brought me so much joy to see the performing arts and music back on the national stage.
Here’s a link to a highlight of the day, the inaugural poem, by lovely and brilliant Amanda Gorman.
Acceptance of others was one theme of the day, so it reminded me of. . . . the gulls on Appledore Island. Bear with me.
A host in the past to the likes of Blackbeard and Captain John Smith, Appledore Island is a half mile wide, made of rock and shrubs. It is the largest in an archipelago seven miles off the coast of Maine known as the Isles of Shoals.
Research student Mary Caswell Stoddard from Yale arrived on Appledore Island in 2007 and found many hundreds of Herring Gulls, like this one, nesting:
Great Black-backed Gulls liked the one below, lived among them, too. They delighted in dive bombing researchers with a Kek Kek and bites to their legs and heads. Helmets are required gear.
But one day a newcomer was observed in a nest on a ledge on the island. It had yellow feet! It didn’t belong in Herring Gull territory. The new bird was a Lesser Black-backed Gull.
This yellow footed gull was soon observed “cavorting” on a cliff with another species, a Herring gull. Mary Stoddard, the researcher, noted that the newcomer was gradually accepted by the ornery Herring gulls nesting all around just as she herself, sitting in a makeshift blind, was accepted with time. The newcomer gull lived peacefully with the Appledore gull population.
Stoddard writes :
“. . . the initial excitement and the subsequent dullness eventually gave way to a satisfying equilibrium: At some point, I realized that I knew gull-speak. I understood the patterns and peculiarities of the Lesser Black-backed Gull and his mate–what times of day they preferred to incubate, which neighbors they particularly disliked, how they communicated with one another using mew calls and head tosses.”
Stoddard wrote about the gulls in Birdwatching Magazine. From 2008 to 2011, this same male Lesser Black-backed Gull (sex determined by DNA testing) returned to the exact same spot on Appledore to breed with his Herring Gull mate. They had chicks that survived, something that interested researchers, as the gull parents were of different species.
Nature is an endless well of stories about living things, like the Lesser Black-backed Gull, finding a way to live and thrive among others who are different.
This haiku might describe what the researcher saw through her binoculars.
Different kind of gull stranger with bright yellow feet preens on rocky ledge. © Janice Scully 2021
If you’d like to hear the sounds gulls make click here.
I hope everyone is well and may we all get vaccinated soon.