SEAGULL, METAPHOR OF FREEDOM IN ART & LITERATURE

Contemplating seagulls & diving, Llafranc-Tamariu

Yesterday, The Grandma and her friends decided to sail, to contemplate sea birds and to dive in the Mediterranean Sea. It was a different day without technology, connexions, blog, phones... only they and the sea.

Birds are animals that are associated with freedom. Perhaps because of their ability to fly, humans consider them in that way. Birds are also a constant in literature and music.

The Grandma remembers beautiful songs like Rossinyol, a Catalan theme that talks about freedom in exile; Txoria Txori, a Basque song written by Mikel Laboa that talks about freedom and repression; La Coloma -in Catalan- or La Paloma -its version in Spanish that talk about exile and longing; La Cançó de na Ruixa Mantells, a Majorcan story of a woman who loses her head waiting the return of her lover who once sailed and never returned or The seabird, a song composed by the Irish Eleanor McEvoy, that talks about repression, resilience and freedom.

The Grandma and her friends are visiting lands of havaneres and because of this, she thought in La Gavina, one of the most popular havaneres that talks about a seagull as a metaphor of freedom, the story of a birds that emigrates with the idea of returning to the beach where it was born, another metaphor of exile and return.

Tonyi Tamaki, who is a great expert in flora and fauna, explained lots of interesting things about seagulls to her friends. They contemplated them and discovered the wonderful life under the sea. Tonyi also explained the most important characteristics of seagulls, their species and their habitats.

Before Tonyi's explanations, The Grandma had studied a new lesson of her Ms. Excel course.

Chapter 15. Import and export data in Excel (IV) (Spanish Version)

Gulls or seagulls are seabirds of the family Laridae in the suborder Lari. They are most closely related to the terns (family Sternidae) and only distantly related to auks, skimmers, and more distantly to the waders. Until the 21st century, most gulls were placed in the genus Larus, but this arrangement is now considered polyphyletic, leading to the resurrection of several genera. An older name for gulls is mews, cognate with German Möwe, Danish måge, Dutch meeuw, and French mouette; this term can still be found in certain regional dialects.

Gulls are typically medium to large birds, usually grey or white, often with black markings on the head or wings. They typically have harsh wailing or squawking calls; stout, longish bills; and webbed feet. Most gulls are ground-nesting carnivores which take live food or scavenge opportunistically, particularly the Larus species. Live food often includes crabs and small fish.

A seagull, Mediterranean Coast

Gulls have unhinging jaws which allow them to consume large prey. Gulls are typically coastal or inland species, rarely venturing far out to sea, except for the kittiwakes. The large species take up to four years to attain full adult plumage, but two years is typical for small gulls. Large white-headed gulls are typically long-lived birds, with a maximum age of 49 years recorded for the herring gull.

Gulls nest in large, densely packed, noisy colonies. They lay two or three speckled eggs in nests composed of vegetation. The young are precocial, born with dark mottled down and mobile upon hatching.

Gulls are resourceful, inquisitive, and intelligent, the larger species in particular, demonstrating complex methods of communication and a highly developed social structure. For example, many gull colonies display mobbing behavior, attacking and harassing predators and other intruders.

Certain species have exhibited tool-use behavior, such as the herring gull, using pieces of bread as bait with which to catch goldfish, for example. Many species of gulls have learned to coexist successfully with humans and have thrived in human habitats. Others rely on kleptoparasitism to get their food.

Gulls have been observed preying on live whales, landing on the whale as it surfaces to peck out pieces of flesh.

More information: RSPB

Gulls range in size from the little gull, at 120 g and 29 cm, to the great black-backed gull, at 1.75 kg and 76 cm. They are generally uniform in shape, with heavy bodies, long wings, and moderately long necks. The tails of all but three species are rounded; the exceptions being Sabine's gull and swallow-tailed gulls, which have forked tails, and Ross's gull, which has a wedge-shaped tail.

Gulls have moderately long legs, especially when compared to the similar terns, with fully webbed feet. The bill is generally heavy and slightly hooked, with the larger species having stouter bills than the smaller species. The bill colour is often yellow with a red spot for the larger white-headed species and red, dark red or black in the smaller species.

The gulls are generalist feeders. Indeed, they are the least specialised of all the seabirds, and their morphology allows for equal adeptness in swimming, flying, and walking. They are more adept walking on land than most other seabirds, and the smaller gulls tend to be more manoeuvrable while walking. The walking gait of gulls includes a slight side to side motion, something that can be exaggerated in breeding displays. In the air, they are able to hover and they are also able to take off quickly with little space.

Two seagulls, Mediterranean Sea

The general pattern of plumage in adult gulls is a white body with a darker mantle; the extent to which the mantle is darker varies from pale grey to black. A few species vary in this, the ivory gull is entirely white, and some like the lava gull and Heermann's gull have partly or entirely grey bodies.

The wingtips of most species are black, which improves their resistance to wear and tear, usually with a diagnostic pattern of white markings. The head of a gull may be covered by a dark hood or be entirely white. The plumage of the head varies by breeding season; in nonbreeding dark-hooded gulls, the hood is lost, sometimes leaving a single spot behind the eye, and in white-headed gulls, nonbreeding heads may have streaking.

Charadriiform birds drink salt water, as well as fresh water, as they possess exocrine glands located in supraorbital grooves of the skull by which salt can be excreted through the nostrils to assist the kidneys in maintaining electrolyte balance.

More information: The Wildlife Trusts

Gulls are highly adaptable feeders that opportunistically take a wide range of prey. The food taken by gulls includes fish and marine and freshwater invertebrates, both alive and already dead, terrestrial arthropods and invertebrates such as insects and earthworms, rodents, eggs, carrion, offal, reptiles, amphibians, plant items such as seeds and fruit, human refuse, chips, and even other birds. No gull species is a single-prey specialist, and no gull species forages using only a single method.

The type of food depends on circumstances, and terrestrial prey such as seeds, fruit, and earthworms are more common during the breeding season while marine prey is more common in the nonbreeding season when birds spend more time on large bodies of water.

Gulls are monogamous and colonial breeders that display mate fidelity that usually lasts for the life of the pair. Divorce of mated pairs does occur, but it apparently has a social cost that persists for a number of years after the break-up.

Gulls also display high levels of site fidelity, returning to the same colony after breeding there once and even usually breeding in the same location within that colony. Colonies can vary from just a few pairs to over a hundred thousand pairs, and may be exclusive to that gull species or shared with other seabird species. A few species nest singly, and single pairs of band-tailed gulls may breed in colonies of other birds. 

A colony of seagulls, Mediterranean Sea

Within colonies, gull pairs are territorial, defending an area of varying size around the nesting site from others of their species. This area can be as large as a 5-m radius around the nest in the herring gull to just a tiny area of cliff ledge in the kittiwakes.

The family Laridae was introduced, as Laridia, by the French polymath Constantine Samuel Rafinesque in 1815. The taxonomy of gulls is confused by their widespread distribution zones of hybridization leading to geneflow. Some have traditionally been considered ring species, but recent evidence suggests that this assumption is questionable.

Until recently, most gulls were placed in the genus Larus, but this arrangement is now known to be polyphyletic, leading to the resurrection of the genera Ichthyaetus, Chroicocephalus, Leucophaeus, Saundersilarus, and Hydrocoloeus. 

Some English names refer to species complexes within the group:

-Large white-headed gull is used to describe the 18 or so herring gull-like species from California gull to lesser black-backed gull in the taxonomic list below.

-White-winged gull is used to describe the four pale-winged, high Arctic-breeding taxa within the former group; these are Iceland gull, glaucous gull, Thayer's gull, and Kumlien's gull.

Hybridisation between species of gull occurs quite frequently, although to varying degrees depending on the species involved. The taxonomy of the large white-headed gulls is particularly complicated.

More information: Mediterranean Waterbirds

The Mediterranean gull or Ichthyaetus melanocephalus is a small gull. The scientific name is from Ancient Greek. The genus Ichthyaetus is from ikhthus, fish, and aetos, eagle, and the specific melanocephalus is from melas, black, and kephalos, headed.

This gull breeds almost entirely in the Western Palearctic, mainly in the south east, especially around the Black Sea, and in central Turkey. There are colonies elsewhere in southern Europe, and this species has undergone a dramatic range expansion in recent decades. As is the case with many gulls, it has traditionally been placed in the genus Larus.

The Mediterranean gull is slightly larger and bulkier than the black-headed gull with a heavier bill and longer, darker legs. The breeding plumage adult is a distinctive white gull, with a very pale grey mantle and wings with white primary feathers without black tips. The black hood extends down the nape and shows distinct white eye crescents. The blunt tipped, parallel sided, dark red bill has a black subterminal band. The non breeding adult is similar but the hood is reduced to an extensive dusky bandit mask through the eye. This bird takes two years to reach maturity. First year birds have a black terminal tail band and more black areas in the upperwings, but have pale underwings.

More information: Mediterranean Nature

I think that going to the beach as a child,

being in the water and smelling that 

salt air and hearing the seagulls,

it had a real calming effect.

Brian Skerry