One Picture
SPECIFICATIONS
Photographer: Brutus Östling
Subject: Herring gull
Where: West coast of Norway, near Trondheim
Camera: Canon 1D Mark II
Lens: 70-200mm zoom with 1.4x converter, shot at a focal length of 280mm
Film: Digital ISO 250.
Exposure: 1/50th of a second at f11
Gullible
The herring gull (Larus argentatus) is your prototypical “seagull,” which is what non-birdwatchers tend to call any gull, even if the closest sea is a thousand miles away. It is an imposing bird, with a wingspan of nearly five feet, as evidenced in Swedish nature photographer Brutus Östling’s shot of one catapulting into the air. A very common species in northern reaches around the world, this is a truly handsome creature, four or five years old, in full breeding plumage: white head, chest, and tail; gray mantle and upper wings; black wingtips; pink legs; and a bright-yellow bill with a nifty red spot at the tip. Younger birds of this species and its relatives are so confusing in the field that even superbirders may give up and refer to them as gulls. As guidebook author David Allen Sibley writes, “Gull identification represents one of the most challenging and subjective puzzles in birding and should be approached only with patient and methodical study.”
In North America herring gulls breed across Alaska and Canada, around the Great Lakes, and down the Northeast coast, hanging out in winter along coastlines as far south as the Gulf of Mexico as well as along major inland rivers. When it comes to food, they are omnivorous and opportunistic. For example, they follow fishing boats far out to sea and farm plows far inland. And they congregate with other gulls at garbage landfills—a good place to practice identification skills. Östling relates that his dramatic photo, which is from his book Between the Wingtips: The Secret Life of Birds (Collins), was taken on the Norwegian Sea on a bad-weather day when light was so poor that five hours and a hundred exposures at slow shutter speeds produced only two usable images where the herring gull’s eyes were reasonably sharp.—Les Line |
