It’s Pie Day today: the annual pie-baking drive for the local elementary school, so look for a stuffed Professor Ceiling Cat this afternoon and some nice pie photos tomorrow. In the meantime, we got your wildlife.

First, two meese from Stephen Barnard:

A couple of moose (Alces alces) helping themselves to my alfalfa, and three youngsters taking a break.

And reader Ed Kroc documented some animal behavior:

I wanted to send along a series of photos of two adult male Glaucous-winged Gulls (Larus glaucescens) wrestling each other on a balcony ledge some twenty storeys above downtown Vancouver.  I have seen gulls do this to both establish or defend a territory, as well as to vie for a potential mate.  I do not know if females engage in similar behaviours.  I haven’t witnessed it personally, although I don’t think that should be taken as evidence against the proposition: I freely admit that I am drawing from an extremely small and nonrandom sample of local gulls (and I also couldn’t really tell the sexes apart at a glance until about a year ago).

Anyway, what is odd to me is that I’ve usually observed this behaviour in the late winter and spring months, when the gulls return to their nesting sites or look to establish new ones.  These two were going at it in September though (notice the dirty streaking on their necks and heads – that’s the winter hood coming in).  The gull on the right in these pictures engaged the one on the left.  They wrangled each other for about a minute, with the attacker seeming to have the upper hand (he has the other’s beak firmly clamped in his own for most of the struggle).  I captured the last few seconds on video, after the wings had stopped flapping and the defendant looked to be considering submission.  A third male interjected himself though and scattered the pair before they could finish the skirmish.