Here is an interesting story that was told to me by one of my early mentors
who witnessed this bloody affair. I have copied it from an old Auk.
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Great Black-backed Gulls Killing Dovekles.--On 16 November 1959 there
was a Dovekie "wreck" on Cape Cod, which centered at Bodfish Park, East
Sandwich, at the head of Cape Cod Bay. During the second day of a northeast
gale observers there watched for two and a half hours as an estimated
thousand Dovekies were driven ashore by a 50-mile-an-hour wind, which was
directly
onshore. Flocks averaging about 25 Dovekies each were blown in, one after
another, and, attempting to land on the six-foot waves crashing on the shore,
were hurled to the
beach. Here, on the sand or in small pools, they were pounced upon by the
Great
Black-backed Gulls hovering over the area. Picked up in a gulls
bill, the Dovekie was carried high over the parking area and dropped
directly on
the black-top surface. The gull followed it down, tore it apart, and
swallowed the
pieces. If the Dovekie was able to break its fall by spread wings, the gull
picked
it up and dropped it a second time, which insured its death. There were
often
20 Dovekies struggling at the water's edge at one time, with the gulls
fighting to
get at them. On about 10 occasions a gull was seen actually catching a
Dovekie
on the wing, "picking it out of the air." Each time it was caught by the
back of
the neck and brought down to the ground, shaken hard until it became limp,
and
then eaten. Of the thousand or more Dovekies blown ashore here few if any
survived, "they were no doubt eaten at once as gulls were
in the air everywhere."
No specific instance of this species catching Dovekies has been found in
literature or through correspondence. The dropping of clams and other molluscs
on hard surfaces by various species of gulls is well known. But Tinbergen
("The Herring Gulls World," Collins, 1953, p. 31) says: "I know of only one
instance in which a gull was seen dropping something soft" (a Great
Black-backed
Gull dropping a rat).
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As far as gulls dropping things onto pavement to crack them open, I do not
think that there is a hard surface on the coast of New England, be it roadway,
sidewalk, tennis court, parking lot or jetty, that is not littered with the
broken shells of millions of crabs and mollusks that were smashed there by
Herring and Great Black-backed Gulls. I have slides of a first winter Herring
Gull that found a tennis ball and dropped it continually onto a jagged jetty
in Newburyport Harbor. For over an hour we watched as from a height of about
fifty feet, the gull would drop and follow down this ball. As it hit the jetty
it would bounce to one side or the other drawing the young gull out of its
vertical decent. The gull would grab the ball and mantle it, protecting it
from the forays of predating gulls........which never came. They did not want
his ball.
Bob Abrams
McLean, Virginia
