June 8th, Sunday morning, was my first official round of gull nest monitoring. As I mentioned in a previous post, the route I’ve taken for the last few years is inaccessible in a few places. But I went where I could.

I didn’t grasp it at the time, but these footprints I found on an inexplicably sand-covered sidewalk summarized my state that day: disorientation. After ten months, I feel bewildered and disconnected from the gulls. It will take a few more weeks to get myself closer to them, for their lives to intertwine with mine.

Approaching White Lake on my yearly pilgrimage to the BC interior, I was greeted by this sign. The Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory is located close to the lake – it was incredibly liberating to bird without a phone or camera, using only a notebook. Photographs never capture the reality of birds: the Bullock’s Orioles I saw glowed a smouldering amber illuminated from within by a flame of golden-apricot.

The construction drags on, seemingly endlessly, on both the Granville Street and Cambie Bridges. As June draws near, I’m increasingly disheartened knowing I may be unable to observe some of the most visible gull nests. If I’m lucky, the work will be done before mid-June. Or perhaps this is an obstacle that will force me to look elsewhere and find new nests.

As spring fades in, I’ve become obsessed with watching the Bonaparte’s Gulls (Chroicocephalus philadelphia) migrating through on their way north. One of the smallest gulls in North America, they still hold many secrets. They breed in the boreal forests and are the only gull that regularily nests in trees.

Little is known about their breeding biology as they nest in remote locations and in small colonies, and the only serious study was done in 1934 by A.D. Twomey: Breeding habits of Bonaparte’s Gull. Remarkably, it’s a mere seven pages long (with one page of photos)… a humbling reminder of how utterly ignorant we are of most of the beings we share this planet with.