Digging Deeper: Depression and the Past. Digging Deeper: Germs and Disease. Digging Deeper: Milk and Immunity. What do the different calls of gulls mean? Submitted By:. Grade Level:. To learn more about the songs of birds, try these links. Birds and Their Songs Bird Finder. If you live in downtown St. John's like I do, or indeed near any body of water that attracts seagulls, you've heard the cacophonous squawking of gulls piercing through the wee hours of the morning.
After a sleepless night, I resolved to get to the bottom of the incessant cawing, and to find an explanation. I called up three seabird biologists.
Ian Jones is a biology professor and seabird specialist at Memorial University in St. I first assumed that gulls make noise during mating rituals. But Richards gave me a much more unsettling answer.
And the neighbours next door [i. When I asked Flores, who has spent a lot of time around large gull colonies, whether she's witnessed these brutish acts of gull-on-gull cannibalism, she cheerily said, "Oh yeah!
Flores said the cannibalistic attacker either chases away the parents or waits for the parents to leave on a foraging trip so it can dig through the nest and find an easy meal. The noise we hear could well be a brave parent standing in the face of danger to protect its kids from being eaten alive. When I brought up these callous acts to Jones, he confirmed that this does happen and could be the case, but suggested a different answer based on his observations with local colonies.
Jones suggested the metaphor of a graduation, where the proud adults are cheering on the younglings during their first leap into the sky. Either way you look at it, the noise we hear around this time is gulls being great parents. But the reasons why seagulls are in urban areas at all speaks to a larger issue not just of bird behaviour, but human behaviour — from the small bin bags to the large overfishing.
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Weekly Podcast. The Explainer is a weekly podcast from TheJournal. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts. Newsletters : Sign Up. Partner Publications. The latest Irish and international sports news for readers and members. A platform helping fund the type of in-depth journalism that the public wants to see. You might have noticed some squawking from very early in the morning. Image: Sam Boal. Source: Sam Boal Another aspect to all this is the Covid pandemic.
With Covid, all of a sudden fewer people are around, so all of a sudden they had a food source disappear. We have a cull policy with badgers, and that seems devoid of evidence.
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