Sea's sloppy today. Here a wave and there one. And at long last they all drown in their own slosh. Not worthwhile to screw the telephoto lens on the camera.
And in the van, with me, it is none the better. Out of focus, trying to screw the lens cap onto the water bottle, things that fall on the ground and instantly disappear or roll under my bed beyond reach. In short: chaos and ugly all around.
On top of that, how for Pete's sake can you hurt yourself on porridge? Well, I had spilled some over the brim of my mega-mug and that had dried up and got stuck on it. When I wanted to pick it off with my thumbnail the crust shot under it and I still feel it. Mother, Mary and Jozuf!
And gulls I never paid much attention to either. Maybe because they were so forward, shrieking over the holiday boat, thieving each others’ grub or so dumb as to get their neck caught in a six-pack beer ring on the local dump.
Squallers, bread lifters and mass crappers they were, lowlife pariahs.
Not here. Here they have the dignity of noble savages, here they work for a living and rule the sky, weather or not.
And since I know I can photograph in RAW, how to get nine frames a second and borrow Kevin's monopod, I need an object to practice on. And I have the gulls’ spontaneous cooperation. Because as long as I have lived here I have never deliberately bothered them, they all do their very own thing.
Of course I wanted to portray them as beautiful and interesting as I can and therefore often keep them in my view finder for minutes on end. Then I see that they are not just there when I don't look, but that they do all kinds of things. Particularly making a living. And how.
When the tide's going out and the worn-out barnacle and mussel fry-encrusted see-urchin holes run dry, they come. First they sweep the breakers, or if there's a swell, skim in kamikaze style sometimes almost under the cast.
Next, they all have their mostly own allotment, which they rather casually defend with sound and flutter when appetite gathers them too close. Occasionally one chases the other into the wind and they dive at staggering speed back to their pecking, the pursuer cockily content by having seen to his stake, the chased aloof and with a shrug as if this trifle isn't really worth noticing. Oddly this territorial behaviour hardly goes against other species like oystercatchers and jackdaws. Like I undertake ever other step stone paths across the rocks, so they scurry studiously, with apparent logic, between the ridges and puddles. I see them pecking, sometimes with their heads sideways to get under a ledge, sometimes ducking in a rock pool. And sometimes they stand still, gazing over the waters or burying their beaks in their plumage as if deliberating what to do next and how to go on.
But yesterday I did see something very peculiar. I had read about it, a comic book comes to mind, but had never seen it. I made a photo story about it which you can find in the Photo dept. under 'Funny Things'.
It begins with a gull that has something in its beak. Let's skip the pecking on it not bringing result. Then you see he has flown up with it and 'stands' winging in the air. In three fast frames you see he drops it. I suppose it's some sort of shell creature that he can't get to with his beak and therefore drops it on the rocks to crush it and have his fill with the resident.
What happens then is gullows humour. The gull gobbles up the content when another one tries to scare him away with puffed-up plumage. This one picks up the meanwhile empty housing and flies it away. The first gull follows and you can see him chuckle about what's not going to happen.
Meanwhile, thanks to the photo above, I discovered what it is they drop to pieces. I thought of a shell creature, possibly a mussel. But if you look closely, you can see it is round with a lighter centre. That is a sea urchin.
Here you find sea urchins galore. Almost in every rock pool they are and not seldom whole colonies. They feed by scraping off the seabed with their teeth. On the face of it new food washes in often enough as most of them sit in self worn down holes. Then stones wash in and are milled around by the water so it's ground out to fit an even larger stone. At long last a rockscape comes about of holes and puddles with leftover bridges and undercuts.
The gulls drop the sea urchins here, because the urchins are most likely to fall on a point or a ledge and burst open. You could say that in time, say a few thousand years, the sea urchin digs his own grave.
Before I take a sip I blow the teabag across my mega-mug, for I wasn't born yesterday either.
Outside the tide has washed over the whole theatre. The gulls are gone, except for a couple, very romantic together on the rolling stone slab…