Maybe I should add a new tag called “Avian altercations,” as we’re getting a lot of such photos. This picture comes from Rob Bate, president of the Brooklyn Bird Club, who also sent a message:
Thanks for promoting birds on your site. We in the birding community welcome any publicity for bird diversity especially beyond the more charismatic birds like hawks, eagles and swans which attract everyone’s attention.
I’m sure your are inundated with bird photos these days but thought I’d send along this one of a Ring-billed Gull (our most common gull in New York) and a Common Crow. The crow was pilfering the food brought out by the gull onto the ice here in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. It’s hard to say who was winning the battle but it looked more like a dance. The gull is a juvenile and the crow shows a lot of wear on his tail feathers as he has not yet molted into fresh breeding plumage.
Lovely photo! Nice to know that crows and gulls have the same relationship across continents.
Great shot!
Very good. From the context it appears the crow was crashing a gull party, but is that a duck in the background?
To answer that question, I think we’d have to find a witch against which to weigh it….
b&
The regular posting of wildlife and cat pieces are a nice touch, introducing playfulness to an otherwise serious website. The recent posts depicting bird altercations also serve as a metaphor for repartee among some commenters on this website. 🙂
😀
Prospect Park? Did someone bring the bialys?
seagulls aren’t as good at figuring out how to get food out of things as crows are (no surprise given what we know about crow intelligence). My dad told me recently he saw a bunch of seagulls trying to get chip crums out of a bag. They didn’t know what to do. A crow came a long, scared off the seagulls then picked up the bag, tipped out the crums & ate them.
crums = crumbs but I like my spelling better. 🙂
Your spelling would appear to be more crummy than crumbly….
b&
The lesser-spotted Aberdonian Intelligent Seagull would just rip the bag to pieces.
Hmmm, somewhere in the depths of YouTube should be video of an Aberdonian seagull (probably the only member of the species mentioned above) shoplifting a packet of crisps from … well, a shop. Obviously.
Ha ha! I love the picture of him caught in the act!
Sam the Seagull probably got mugged 30 seconds later. If that”s the shop that I think it is, it’s in one of the really dodgy areas of town.
Now, if you were the pope, you’d give them both a nom.
Ok, so where are the blueprints for these birds? No blueprints, they couldn’t have evolved. Could they?
I want to see the product backlog for these birds! What’s in the next release?
Can people give us the Latin binomials pretty please when putting bird/animal pictures?
Larus delawarensis