If you were making a film and needed to cast a bird in the Edward G. Robinson role, you’d hand the script to a great black backed gull. Large birds with attitude, great black backs are adaptable, tough and smart. They are as likely to be eating the lobster they stole from your unattended picnic plate in Maine as they are to enjoy a kid’s leftover pizza crust on a park bench in Brooklyn. They also know how to put the squeeze on their neighbors, pilfering fish and other hard-won prey items from any number of other species.
If it was not enough to have their catch stolen, the gulls’ neighbors should watch out for themselves. Black backs have an unerring sense for distinguishing weakened, winter-starved birds from the rest of their flocks. Unfortunately for their victims, gulls lack the specialized killing tools of raptors. When black backs move in for the kill, it is not pretty.
To most New Yorkers, a gull is a gull is a gull. It is easy to overlook the differences among individual gulls loafing on a pier. One would never guess from his screen presence that the thuggish Mr. Robinson was actually a cultured philanthropist. Similarly, one might never suspect that gulls play key roles in our local ecosystem: acting as scavengers, and rubbing out the unfit and the infirm. Gulls demonstrate an eerily human intelligence, and their social behaviors are fascinating to watch. Great black backs are well adapted to life in an increasingly human-dominated world.
It is interesting to note that this familiar New York City bird is the largest gull in the world, with a wingspan that can reach about five feet and a weight of more than four pounds. Locally, you need only make your way to a fishing pier, a Dumpster or even a frozen shoreline to see one. These large birds can also be found foraging well inland, in a variety of urban, suburban and rural settings. Here, everything from mice to snakes, McDonald’s leftovers and Starbucks’ scraps, can be fair pickings for these ultimate opportunists.
Like many seabirds (and not unlike sea turtles and crocodiles), the great black gull (Larus marinus) can drink saltwater. Glands located just above the birds’ eyes remove excess salt from their blood, which the bird exudes as a highly concentrated, salty solution from its nostrils. This fluid drips down grooves in the bird’s bill, where it collects until a quick shake of the head sends it back out to sea. Still, processing seawater requires a great deal of energy, so fresh water is a valuable commodity. Fortunately, great black backs are not too choosy about where they drink. They’ll happily drink water trapped in an old tire; they’ll drink the icy effluent from melting old snow piles.
Naturally, the bully had once been the victim. The great black back was hunted mercilessly at the end of the 19th century in the never-ending quest to fill ladies’ hats with feathers. The birds’ numbers have since rebounded, and their populations are now considered stable throughout their range.
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