The Laughing Gulls of San Salvador Island

The Laughing Gulls of San Salvador Island

By Campbell Crum

One of my absolute favorite parts of the whole USCB trip to San Salvador Island had to have been the wildlife itself. Not surprising, given that I'm a biology major, but still I've taken so many photos that my MacBook's storage was genuinely shrieking half the time I was there. Thankfully now that I'm home again, I've had the time to look through my photos and reexamine them properly. Here are just some photos from one encounter:

A pair of Laughing Gulls. This was at the dock of Harbour Park, which was only a short walk away from the Gerace Center campus.  At first I'd assumed that it was a juvenile gull begging it's mother for food, but since I later saw them mating...I decided to do a google search. Turns out it is common amongst gulls and terns for mating to involve something known as a "feeding ritual." 

For some species, telling the sex of an individual bird can be almost impossible, but for Laughing Gulls I have read that they can be differentiated via head length, with males have longer heads than females. The female is the bird on the left in this photo, the male is the larger bird in general on the right. She begged for what was probably half an hour, all while the male just sat there and thought about it. 

Definitely one of the grossest things I've ever photographed.

But they were absolutely gorgeous birds, just as they are here at home. They nest in colonies, so a colony probably isn't very far away if they're engaging in courtship behavior. Sky-rat is a pretty common term for them here in the Lowcountry, but they aren't nasty birds. Not anymore than any of the other species I've seen at least. They just have their moments. 

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