Today marked the first day of my gull nest monitoring for the 2024 season.
Well, not really – I’ve checked on some of the nests close to my workplace a few times in the last handful of weeks. But this morning I brought my camera and walked almost the entire route, checking in on a majority of the nesting locations I’ve discovered in the previous two years.
For those of you who followed along last year, I’m using the same names for all the nests. While I can’t be compeltely certain, these are probably the same pairs of gulls using the sites, as the research I’ve read suggests these gulls have strong site fidelity1, also known as breeding philopatry.
Jericho Beach Park completely changed this weekend. Spring fell with the rain. Frog song transformed the park, flooding it with birds, covering the trees in leaves that seemed absent a week ago.
A few months ago I somehow started listening to Australian country music from the 1950s and ’60s. One of the artists who stuck out for me was Gordon Parsons.
Here’s an undated recording of him (1970s is my guess?) on a television show performing a song entitled “No Indispensable Man” – based on a 1959 poem by the remarkably named Saxon White Kessinger. Advice I think many of us should consider.
