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On Seagulls and Pigeons
I’ve had a couple of up-close-and-personal experiences with seagulls, aside from being in love with Jonathon Livingston Seagull. One was a bloody massacre on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel following a winter storm. The horrific sight of the mangled seagull bodies hanging from the bridge was traumatic.
In the 70s in Lexington, Kentucky, hundreds of seagulls flew in and landed on the wet parking lot of our grocery store. They whacked their beaks on the pavement and dove head-first into cars. University biologists speculated they’d been caught on strong winter winds blowing East to West. The wet and shiny blacktop looked like water, and they needed a place to rest. The grocery store spread Saltine crackers around the lot for them. Mostly they stayed pretty still for about twelve hours. Then they vanished. For land-locked Kentuckians, some kids were seeing seagulls for the first time.
I imagined while on the yacht I would see many seagulls following the cruise ships and hanging out around the ports. Surely, they’d be all over the sandy beaches, many of which were right downtown lined with restaurants, cafes, and snacking sun worshippers. I looked forward to children running pell-mell into a flock of loitering birds sending them soaring into the air on silent wings while screeching a play-by-play commentary. But no. There were no seagulls.
What there were, were pigeons. One of the islands is even named Pigeon Island! Children ran across the sand into flocks of sun-bathing pigeons who pounded their wings noisily in great effort to get airborne, but spoke not a peep. Chasing pigeons just isn’t the same as chasing seagulls.
Locals speculate these island pigeons are descendants of carrier pigeons who were the leading edge in ship-to-shore communications in 14th through 18th centuries. Some of the pigeons may have been lost along with their messages into the nether world, Hades, or what 21st century scientists know as Cyber Space. Everything has to be somewhere, right? Maybe they were just renegade pigeons who liked the beach life and never homed. And here are their descendants.
I don’t recall if I saw seagulls in Costa Rica when we visited there. There are so many colorful and exotic (to me) birds in Central America I might have just overlooked the seagulls. Does anyone know?
I’ve seen seagulls up and down the Atlantic Coast, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Great Lakes, as well as the Great Salt Lake, and Cliffs of Mohr, but for whatever reason, I did not see seagulls in the Lesser Antilles in the Caribbean. But lots of pigeons.