For reasons I’ve never quite understood, it’s an accepted tradition for people from Birmingham to come down to Stratford for the day at weekends and on Bank Holidays. Maybe they just get tired of breathing the polluted air in the city – I don’t know, but it’s a Thing. And recently it seems to have become another Thing that large gulls come to Stratford at weekends as well – though I admit that my evidence for this is scantier: there were a noticeable number of Lesser Black-Backed and Herring Gulls over the river two Saturdays ago and last Sunday, and an even bigger crowd showed up today, whereas there were none on any of the intervening weekdays when I happened to walk along the river bank. It’s thin, I know, but I’m sticking with my theory.
This particular tourist is a Lesser Black-backed Gull – yellow legs and narrow, mid-grey wings being the identifiers – and it spent quite a bit of the time I was watching it trying to retrieve something from the river. In the main image you can see from the disturbance in the water that it was just lifting off, and in my second image it was preparing to go in again for another attempt. I couldn’t see whatever it was the bird had spotted, and in the end it gave up trying to grab it and flew away. Lesser Black-backs are omnivorous, and will take fish on occasion, but like all gulls they’re inquisitive and opportunistic, so it could just as easily have been a leaf or a piece of debris that the bird was investigating, in the hope that it might be edible.
R: L2, C7, D3.
