Natural Selection

Given the storms yesterday I was geared up for looking for seabirds at Crosby before the news of the Snow Goose broke. I checked Crosby Marina late morning and seawatched briefly a little further north. I was hoping for Little Gulls, and if I had stuck at it may have been rewarded as a couple were seen off Crosby Beach over high tide.

Before picking Jane up after her class I returned to the marina. Large bodies of water next to the sea like this often harbour windblown seabirds. On the Fylde Fleetwood Marine Lake and Fairhaven Lake are often productive, there’s Southport across the Ribble and across the Mersey West Kirby Marine Lake. The various docks and harbours from Barrow to Heysham to Liverpool and Birkenhead can also be productive.

In the event it wasn’t a Little Gull but a Kittiwake I picked out among the Black-headed Gulls. To be blunt it was clearly knackered. One of my pet peeves is when birds like this are reported to be ‘tame’. Being too exhausted to fly off is not the same as being habituated towards humans.

You can see from the pictures that it’s a relatively young bird. Mortality is generally higher among young birds in challenging conditions. Fingers crossed it just needed to get out of the wind for a while and was able to return to the sea to forage when things calmed down a bit.