Simple Beauty
A quote about gulls in flight crosses my mind whenever I see one. Beauty is all around us -- even in overlooked and (undeservingly) maligned gulls (or ducks).
A gull in flight is simple beauty.
I think this whenever I see a gull in flight. Always believed E.B. White wrote this in One Man’s Meat, about leaving New York City for his Maine saltwater farm.
Working at a bookstore years ago—my second, I love books—my boss selected One Man’s Meat as her staff pick. It’s a wonderful book, published in 1942. White states:
Never a big seller, [One Man’s Meat] early showed staying power. A book that manages not to fade away after a few years occupies a special place in the heart of its author.
The fact I think of words I might’ve read in the book years ago is indicative of staying power. I remember things from then—customer interactions, journaling in the break room, joys shared with an older coworker—but not everything.
Did I fabricate this? Nope. Reread the book. Page 73.
“I am raising a baby seagull,” White begins. Oh E.B., they are plainly gulls, sans sea-. “A young gull eats twice his own weight in food every ten minutes, and if he doesn’t get it he screams.”
White tried to get a hen to adopt the gull. The gull wanted him. He fed the bird pretty much anything.
In the last three weeks he has swallowed a mixture of foods that would sicken you to listen to. (His favorite dish is chicken gizzards chopped with clams, angle worms, and laying mash.) He has eaten ten thousand clams—of my own digging—and still screams accusingly every time I go by.
But then:
A mature gull in flight is simple beauty. Some day this child of mine is going to be stretching his wings and a gentle puff will come along and he will take off. The pleasure of seeing my worms and gizzards translated into perfect flight will be my strange reward.
Why am I drawn to this quote?
We’re surrounded by beauty, always. Even if we don’t realize, even if it’s simple.
Seaside goldenrod. An interestingly shaped white oak. The bark of a paper birch, moss on the floor of a trail. Sensitive, cinnamon, hay-scented ferns. White-throated Sparrows, written about beautifully by Sydney Michalski; ice formations, written about beautifully by Neil Barker. A gull in flight.
After reading an essay, I’ve been writing about beauty (not this). Have wanted to write about Richard O. Prum’s The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us. Beauty has been on my mind.
“On Watching Birds,” written in 1988 by Lawrence Kilham, opens:
When I spoke to a scientific colleague about a sense of beauty, he said there is no such thing. Some people think a factory chimney is beautiful, and others think it is the opposite. For my part I think a sense of the beauty of nature is innate.
The beauty of a gull in flight is innate. A person’s reaction to a gull might be irritation—even contempt. It’s a gull. People have disdain for gulls. But gulls take beautifully to the wing, in perfect flight.
A gull’s way of being is not haphazard. That is beautiful. They’re gorgeous for specific reasons. Think of the gonydeal spot. That bit of red on the bills of some gulls. When I learned the reason for the spot, it became even more beautiful.
Parent gulls return to nests with food in their stomachs. For species with a gonydeal spot, nestlings see the red and instinctively peck at it. The parent regurgitates. Bill pecking isn’t necessarily limited to nestlings and parents; the bill’s tip is thought to be the most sensitive part.
A gonydeal spot is a helpful way to identify a mature Herring Gull. Ring-billed Gulls don’t have them. Herring or Ring-billed are safe species bets when you see a gull.
An immature Herring Gull’s bill can be all black, or just at the tip. At a glance, this can make one look like a Ring-billed. Gull bills and plumage are a rabbit hole. Other gulls have similarly black bills when immature. Great Black-backed and Western, for example. This is in immature gulls. Any nonadult gull qualifies as immature, but there are many categories within immature. This is helpful, so is this—specifically about Herring Gulls.
First winter, juvenile, second summer, much to know. The plumage a bird gets after first fledging is juvenile plumage. October to April is first winter, first summer is April to August, August to April is second winter. Some species go into adult plumage in third winter. A gull’s fourth year typically marks adult plumage. Within adult plumage, there’s breeding and non-breeding. But this isn’t a treatise on gull plumage. I have more to learn.
Per Audubon’s The Birdist,
Bill patterns are very helpful in gull identification. Most adult white-headed gulls have yellow bills with some additional coloring. Many species have red or black spots on the lower part of the front of the bill, called a gonydeal spot. Adult ring-bills, however, don’t have a spot, they’ve got a clean black band towards the tip of the bill, surrounded by yellow.
For my money, it’s the most helpful common gull identification point there is. If you see a gull with red on its bill, it ain’t a ring-billed.
A gonydeal spot helps differentiate Herring from Ring-billed Gulls. Aside from a gonydeal spot there are other cues to tell one from the other.
I discussed this with a budding birder. A joy of birding is sharing it. Some birds came to make sense to them, mainly ducks. They identified a Lesser Scaup when I’d incorrectly thought Greater. Scaup are hard. The next logical step was gulls.
There was a distant adult Herring Gull in flight.
“What kind of gull is that?” I asked.
“Bonaparte’s?”
Silent pause. I adore Bonaparte’s Gulls.
“No,” they added. “If it was Bonaparte’s you’d have lost it. Herring Gull.”
There are other things to look for in a Herring Gull aside from the gonydeal spot. Grey back, black wingtips spotted with white, pink legs, heavier bill. A Ring-billed is also smaller than a Herring. A mature Ring-billed Gull’s legs are yellow. A Herring Gull’s are pink, though a Ring-billed Gull’s legs are pink its first two years.
The simplest way to differentiate the two species is overall size. The Cornell Lab describes Herring Gulls as “robust” and explains: “In flight, they look barrel-chested and broad-winged compared to smaller species such as Ring-billed Gulls.” Ring-billed are described in a different article as “rather delicate by the standards of the larger gull species.”
A gull in flight is simple beauty—though people might call them “shit-hawks.” I will die on this hill: Seeing a bird often is an invitation to know it. It isn’t possible to know a bird too well. If you know species information, learn peculiarities of individual birds.
You might see Herring Gulls all the time. All it takes is a little research to start thinking: The “quintessential gray-and-white, pink-legged ‘seagulls’”—with that gonydeal spot! Of the three eggs, the third chick gets bullied.
Gulls are also a joy overall—occasionally frustrating, possibly embarrassing. They’re
notoriously difficult to identify. Entire books have been dedicated to telling one gull from another, but even these barely scratch the surface. Their plumage changes as they age and there's a great deal of variation within species.
Gulls being difficult, potentially embarrassing, and not immediately rewarding is certainly the case. This is made clear at the start of Gulls Simplified: “Ask any bird-watcher to name the bird group that is most intimidating…they often shout: ‘GULLS!’” Pointing out a Glaucous Gull lacks the wow factor of pointing out a Magnolia Warbler, but simple beauty becomes complex the further you look into it. This compounds the beauty.
I love overlooked birds. Gulls and ducks. Songbirds? Easy to love. Doesn’t take much to recognize a Scarlet Tanager is pretty. But a Bonaparte’s Gull or Lesser Scaup?
Beauty is all around us. Sometimes where you’d least expect. A “seagull” or a duck milling about. Mallard sightings are unremarkable to many. I’ll guiltily include myself in that “many.” I want Green-winged Teal, a Ring-necked Duck, Barrow’s Goldeneye.
But is a Mallard unremarkable? Definitely not. That green head! Blue speculum! It lacks the species cache of a Northern Shoveler or Harlequin Duck, but who cares?
If a gull in flight is simple beauty, there are many forms of simple beauty we readily overlook. A Mallard, moss, the setting sun kissing a field, the moon in any phase.
Stop, at least slow down. Be grateful to exist alongside such beauty, to share the world with it. Simple beauty. Simplicity itself is beautiful.
Revere what is easy not to. Easy for me with gulls and ducks—I always revere them. What specifically makes something otherwise unremarkable beautiful?
The iridescence of a Bufflehead’s head. The black on a gull’s wingtips as it soars, the way the sun backlights the white edges of its wings making a pseudo halo. Lichen on a rock. Water clinging to a melting icicle. Colors, fragrance, sound. The way something interacts with light—sunlight, moonlight, starlight, candlelight.
Or no need to get specific. Beauty does not require dissection. Maybe something is simply beautiful because it’s beautiful. A gull in flight, perhaps. What else matters?
Wonderful essay and photos James! Gulls are such an underappreciated bird.
I like your quote: "A gull’s way of being is not haphazard. That is beautiful. They’re gorgeous for specific reasons." I fully agree.
The conservation area where I hike regularly, we have a mass of hundred of mostly Ring-billed Gulls that have a nesting colony nearby. It is such a sight to see at dawn and dusk as the adults fly en masse in search of food. I will be spending more time this coming Spring capturing some images and encounters with the gulls.
Thanks for the mention as well James - much appreciated!
Great photos James! Love the gulls! I do not like that they are so maligned. They have so much character.