Zoosemiotics & The Seagull

Dusk Gull. A moment of respite from the busy day of collecting food and incubating.

The conference of the gulls...

The evening stroll. A seagull wandering the streets of Crail on the lookout for an easy feed...

My desk looks out of my top floor kitchen window. The window itself looks onto a small courtyard with several small lawns and the 'middens'. On the sloping roof opposite, two seagulls are raising their new born, and have been doing so for the past two months. Every day, I am privy to their calls, their 'conversations', their messages... It's a special situation and reminds me a little of when I lived in Warsaw (the bird city) in Poland where it wasn't so much seagulls as it was hooded crows, Russian rooks, and the ever-present kafka (the Polish word for jackdaw). In Warsaw, the sky would darken with the clouds of birds flying overhead. Not so in Glasgow. Glasgow does not occupy the strategic position that the Polish capital does, as a migratory flyway between east and west and north and south. At any rate, I used to take inspiration from my Polish winged brethren as they chakked and crowed outside my studio. And now, it is the seagull's turn.

The other day in fact whilst rummaging through some old folders I came across a sheet of A4 with diagrams of seagulls and their behaviour..... to be precise, Baerend's deterministic model of the control of behaviour in incubating gulls, mainly nesting, incubation, escape, and preening. It had been a gift from my Polish partner who had been studying zoosemiotics and the cognitive evolution of corvids at the Warsaw School of Psychology.

Zoosemiotics is the study of non-human signalling behaviour and animal forms of knowing, and anyone who knows seagulls knows too that their signals and calls are manifold depending on what they are trying to convey. For instance when the father is bringing back food to the incubating mother (or vice versa, both take turns in incubating and finding food), there is usually a longish sequence of 'yay yayyay yay's to tell the mother 'I'm coming, I'm here. Take this bloody food.' And the food may well be bloody, but it's more than likely, due to the litter  and waste problems of the west, come from the local shops, the middens, or the quiet residential streets outside.

All of a seagull's behaviour is fundamental to its living. Not so with humans. Indeed, one might argue that much of human behaviour has become superfluous and unnecessary, just like his language: a lot of hot air signalling not much in general. It's an indication of the level of decadence and removal from Nature that the human has undergone in the past few hundred years (since Newtonian mechanics, Cartesian dualism, the Scottish Enlightenment et al.). When you hear a seagull you know it's important. When you hear a human, more often than not, it's banal, trivial, non-essential flim flam. One might even formulate a mathematical equation to suit this in the form of: the more a human talks, the more removed he is from Nature and his own essential self. Modernity however is characterized by noise, and small talk. There is no small talk for the seagull, only 'large talk', 'wide talk', 'over-arching sky-talk'...

Facts about seagulls

• Seagulls are very clever. They learn, remember and even pass on behaviours, such as stamping their feet in a group to imitate rainfall and trick earthworms to come to the surface.
• Seagulls’ intelligence is clearly demonstrated by a range of different feeding behaviours, such as dropping hard-shelled molluscs onto rocks so that they break open so they can eat them, and following ploughs in fields where they know upturned grubs and other food sources will be plentiful.
• Seagulls are attentive and caring parents. The male and female pair for life and they take turns incubating the eggs, and feeding and protecting the chicks.
• Gulls have a complex and highly developed repertoire for communication which includes a range of vocalisations and body movements.
• Seagulls can drink both fresh and salt water. Most animals are unable to do this, but seagulls have a special pair of glands right above their eyes which is specifically designed to flush the salt from their systems through openings in the bill.
• There is a great deal of diversity between different gull species, with the smallest being the Little Gull (120 g and 29 cm) and the largest being the Great Black-beaked Gull (1.75 kg and 75 cm).
• A small claw halfway up their lower leg enables them to sit and roost on high ledges without being blown off.
• Young gulls form nursery flocks where they will play and learn vital skills for adulthood. Nursery flocks are watched over by a few adult males and these flocks will remain together until the birds are old enough to breed.
• In Native American symbolism, the seagull represents a carefree attitude, versatility, and freedom.
• Many seagulls have learned to conserve energy by hovering over bridges in order to absorb raising heat from paved roadways.
• Seagulls are fondly remembered in Utah for helping Mormon settlers deal with a plague of crickets. The seagull is now the state bird of Utah and a monument in Salt Lake City commemorates the event, known as the ‘Miracle of the Gulls’.

For more info and insight into the life of the gull, check out Don Enright's humorous post here:

http://www.donenright.com/7-habits-highly-effective-seagulls/